1. Dual monitors (using the VGA out)
Issue: Connecting a monitor or projector to the VGA is a PITA. The Nvidia Control panel detects it, but cannot enable it without re-writing a new Xorg.conf file, which is owned by root, and so the new file must be written to /tmp and moved over, then X needs to be restart-ed. Even then, moving an open window into the 2nd screen won't always work, even though the screen is there and I can move the mouse into the window.

Aso, the GPU acceleration seems off when a 2nd screen is connected via VGA. I haven't tried the HDMI out yet.

[01/24/10] SOLVED: See my page on the wiki where I'm also tracking these issues and solutions.

2. Microphone not working
Issue: I installed Skype and it worked great w/ the video camera, however the microphone does not work, even though Skype detected it and claims that it is there.

3. Trackpad
Issues: Multiple issues
- trying to get multitouch to work - Fixed, logged and source.
- trying to turn it off when a mouse is present
- getting middle mouse button when emulating 3 buttons (the mouse button is a rocker, so clicking both is impossible)

The PAE kernel is working fine with the Nvidia ION drivers, suspend and hibernate.

I found more information about a wifi driver, and this post at the Asus forum has links to an actual Linux driver. Using this driver doen't require the NDISwrapper, but I have noticed that the wiki will not re-connect after suspend, which the NDISwrapped, Win2K driver did. However, I've been hibernating (due to the bad batter life on the 1201N) and the wifi works fine after a hibernate wake-up (which is decently fast, especially with BootBlaster for the BIOS).

The opening of the 1201N to replace the hard-drive is a bit more than just opening a panel in the bottom, but it's fairly easy, given you take your time in cracking all the little pressure-tabs which hold the top and bottom of the case together. The new HD and the extra ram are making Ubuntu much more responsive and snappy.

A nice GTK application for blogging is BloGTK. It's written in python and it's fast and a decent replacement for MarsEdit when not on my Mac (not that there are many choices for GTK blogging apps). The 2.0 release is available on LaunchPad, but it requires a few extra python packages to run on a fresh Karmic installation. I've outlined what you need to do below.

The BloGTK 2.0 tarball (itself a python package that needs to be installed as root) will install alright, but it won't run, instead you'll may this:


dillera@granite1201:~/Downloads/blogtk-2.0$ blogtk2
Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/blogtk2", line 6, in <module>
    from blogtk2 import main
  File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/__init__.py", line 35, in <module>
    from blogtk2.main import main
  File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py", line 22, in <module>
    from gdata import service
ImportError: No module named gdata


• Grab BloGTK 2.o
• Grab Python GDATA
• Grab Python feedparser

In your shell, expand them, then as root run the installer....
unzip -d feedparser2 feedparser-4.1.zip
tar xvf gdata-2.0.6.tar.gz

then as root:
# python ./setup.py install
in both of the expanded directories

Finally you'll also need to have the python gtk-spell package installed. This is available in the repo.

# apt-get install python-gtkspell

Now you can run BloGTK.


dillera@granite1201:~$ blogtk2
Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gdata/tlslite/utils/cryptomath.py:9:
DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
  import sha
/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py:63: Warning: g_set_prgname() called multiple times
  program = gnome.init('blogtk', '2.0')


Pros:

• It is very fast

Cons:

• There is no way to specify new formatting types, what is available is just Paragraphs, Blockquotes, unordered lists (and this cannot detect multiple lines of list items)
• There is no image uploading

Alternatives:

• ScribeFire - a nice blogging app that is Firefox Plugin (it does image uploading)

1. Setup Nvidia ION Drivers
2. Enable Multi-touch on Synaptics trackpad
3. Get Wifi Working
4. Add Terminal into Nautilus right-click menu
5. Desktop switching
6. Stop Update Manger
7. Tracking 1201N BIOS releases