Author Archives: ninjaneer

Dell M90 with dotty graphics

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We’ve had a Dell Precision M90 laptop kicking around here for a fair while now with faulty Quadro FX 2500M graphics output. When the machine is powered on, the laptop’s LCD remains blank although the backlight is obviously powering up. If an external screen is connected, a picture is displayed at the POST screen but it is overlaid / disrupted by strings of what look like dots, commas or exclamation marks.

Since the machine is out of warranty and what we clearly have is a faulty graphics card, the question is now – why?

On extensive searching of the web, it seems that this problem is common to many of Dell’s high-end laptops with discrete GPUs and to date there does not seem to be a solid fix from Dell other than to change the graphics card (which may again fail) and update the machine’s BIOS to alter the fan’s duty cycle in the hope of reducing the thermal load.

This post and selection of comments on popey.com gives a little insight with people who have had warranty exchanges on their Dell laptop graphics cards reporting repeat failures later on. One interesting comment mentions the possibility of the components expanding significantly due to the heat and coming into contact with one-another where they shouldn’t causing an electrical short. Having looking at images and diagrams of the graphics card installation which attaches to a socket in the face of the motherboard, I’d be inclined to agree that it is a possibility.

I will hopefully know more once I have dismantled the M90 and gone fishing inside.

Gitso: Cross-Platform Reverse VNC

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I just came across Gitso on Google Code.

I haven’t tried it yet but it is rather interesting in that it allows reverse VNC connections ie: A client requiring assistances fires up Gitso on their machine and ‘requests’ help from their support service via VNC.

As stated by the project page, this would greatly simplify the process of getting someone connected to offer them support via VNC.

Waking up USB ports on Ubuntu Hardy

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Here is another one of my ‘reminder-to-self’ fixes for my Ubuntu 8.04 machines.

I’ve installed Hardy on a good few machines now including Intel C2D/Nvidia chipset desktops and various laptops and discovered that, to my delight, the machines will go in and out of S3 suspend (suspend to ram) in just a few seconds.

There was just one problem which seemed universal though; the USB ports were not reinitializing correctly. It seemed that although the +5v power was coming back, they weren’t being polled for devices or data.

I stumbled across a partial solution by typing lsusb (in an attempt to poll connected devices). Sure enough, the USB data communication came back to life and I was able to use my devices as normal. Obviously, all I needed now was a way to make this happen automatically when the machine comes back out of S3.

User aidave on this post at ubuntuforums came up with a quick bit of hackery to make this happen which I have adapted here:

Fire up a terminal and issue:

cd /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d
sudo touch 98usb
sudo chmod +x 98usb
sudo nano 98usb

You should now have a blank file open in nano (in the console)

Cut and paste the following into nano:

#!/bin/sh

case “$1” in
resume|thaw)
lsusb
;;
*)
;;
esac

It doesn’t fix the issue directly but it qulifies as a work around in that it wakes up the usb ports by polling the with the lsusb command as the machine resumes from ACPI S3 suspend.

Hopefully there will be a proper fix for the issue in a future Ubuntu Hardy patch.