Getting Salix to work better with laptops by default
Posted: 19. May 2010, 21:20
I've been running Salix OS 13.0.2 64bit on an old laptop for a month or two now and it has been a good experience overall. Once I got things up and running and fixed a few issues, things have been good. I wanted to bring up a few of the issues I've had (and solved for myself) and see what you guys think and what (if any) your plans are.
1. Computers with more than one audio device (includes webcams/microphones as well as sound cards) seem to use the webcam/microphone as the default output when they should be using a sound card. The manual fix for this is well documented on the Salix wiki, but is this something the Salix devs are interested in fixing for good? Most other distros I've used had no problem figuring out which card to use as the default, so maybe we could make Salix's sound card detection script a bit smarter.
2. On my laptop, none of the media keys did anything. I followed the procedure of running xev to determine each key's keycode, mapping them in Xmodmap, and adding xfce bindings with the Xfce keyboard bindings app. What do the Salix devs think about a more generalized solution to this that won't require users to set their keys up manually? (Or did I just have an old laptop that was not recognized?)
3. The touchpad on my laptop had various problems, such as tapping-to-click not working and the scrolling not working. I was able to fix this by adding a policy file that I found to /etc/hal/fdi/policy, but couldn't there be some detection mechanism that adds this file automatically if a touchpad is detected?
None of these are a big deal, but they add up to make Salix harder for normal people to set up and use, and they also make me have to spend more time setting it up to work correctly every time I install it. I'm curious as to what the Salix devs think about solving these problems for good in the base install. I'm willing to help find good generic solutions (and have the programming ability) if the devs are open to having these issues fixed, I just don't want to waste my time if there is no chance of it getting accepted.
Thanks,
Adam
1. Computers with more than one audio device (includes webcams/microphones as well as sound cards) seem to use the webcam/microphone as the default output when they should be using a sound card. The manual fix for this is well documented on the Salix wiki, but is this something the Salix devs are interested in fixing for good? Most other distros I've used had no problem figuring out which card to use as the default, so maybe we could make Salix's sound card detection script a bit smarter.
2. On my laptop, none of the media keys did anything. I followed the procedure of running xev to determine each key's keycode, mapping them in Xmodmap, and adding xfce bindings with the Xfce keyboard bindings app. What do the Salix devs think about a more generalized solution to this that won't require users to set their keys up manually? (Or did I just have an old laptop that was not recognized?)
3. The touchpad on my laptop had various problems, such as tapping-to-click not working and the scrolling not working. I was able to fix this by adding a policy file that I found to /etc/hal/fdi/policy, but couldn't there be some detection mechanism that adds this file automatically if a touchpad is detected?
None of these are a big deal, but they add up to make Salix harder for normal people to set up and use, and they also make me have to spend more time setting it up to work correctly every time I install it. I'm curious as to what the Salix devs think about solving these problems for good in the base install. I'm willing to help find good generic solutions (and have the programming ability) if the devs are open to having these issues fixed, I just don't want to waste my time if there is no chance of it getting accepted.
Thanks,
Adam