I've been happily using SL4 on my laptop for a while now and I'd like to
thank all those responsible for the distribution for keeping things
painless. I do however have a few (somewhat minor) issues I haven't been
able to figure out. It would be helpful if someone knows workarounds.
1. I had some issues with getting the install disc (and OS after
installation) to boot with it scanning the USB ports. So, I just tacked
on a 'nousb' to my grub.conf and all has been well. Occasionally, I do
need to use a USB device or two (headphone/microphone, mouse, external
hard drive...) and for those sessions, I modify grub on booting to allow
USB. The cool part here is this works flawlessly, as in I plug a hard
disk in for instance, and on boot up, it shows up on my desktop as an
icon. The annoyance here, however, is if I remove nousb and boot without
a USB device plugged in, it hangs on boot. I am assuming it's stalling
while looking for something that isn't there.
Again, this is just an annoyance. All I do now is to make sure I know
what (if) devices I plan to use and boot with or without nousb as is
appropriate. Is there some way I can get it to both scan for devices,
and not die while trying at the same time? I've tried enabling/disabling
legacy USB support in the BIOS.
2. The little gnome power monitor thing seems to only read the battery's
state on boot up, and not refresh itself during the time the machine is
up. For instance, if I start the machine low on power and not connected
to AC, the display will perpetually show low power, even if I later
plugged it into the power and I know the battery is near full charge.
Is there something that can be done to force it to read battery data
more often?
3. And finally, I like using 'locate'. I don't, however, enjoy
'updatedb' trashing my hard drive as it indexes things so often. Since
this machine is often turned off and turned on, I don't, for instance,
want things like updatedb to be run every day, just every once in a
day's worth of uptime. Could someone point me to a resource to move
these sorts of tasks to an 'anacron' list rather than a 'cron' job list?
Thanks,
Harish
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