Configuring Lenovo 3000 N100 sound card on Linux

I just got a new Lenovo Laptop, the Lenovo 3000 N100 0768-FSG to be exact. I installed SUSE 10.2, and also played around with a Ubuntu 7.04 live cd - neither of which recognized the sound-card. Actually, the sound card was recognized, and configured with the snd-hda-intel driver - but the speakers simply didn't work, neither did headphones.

I solved this in SUSE 10.2 by manually updating the ALSA drivers from the bundled 1.0.14 version to the 1.0.15rc3 development version - this required manual compilation, and installing my distributions kernel source package. The latest ALSA drivers can be found at www.alsa-project.org.

Instructions for installing the latest ALSA drivers from source can be found here, you will only need the alsa-driver package to get the sound working on your laptop, the rest of the packages should have been bundled with your linux distribution and do not require updating.

There are several sites that report getting the sound to work by adding one of the following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo
options snd-hda-intel model=laptop-eapd
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack
And then restarting the sound module. Different lines seem to work for different ALSA versions, and different Lenovo 3000 or other intel powered laptop models. so you might want to try some of these before installing the development drivers.

In SUSE this can also be accomplished by running YaST -> Hardware -> Sound, selcting your sound card and clicking "Edit" you will be able to set the mode option to any of the above there.

UPDATE: On open SuSE 10.3, the sound card works out of the box!

Getting Gmail java app on Motorola i760

My i760 came without a proper web-browser - so I could not download the Gmail java app through the phone, or access m.gmail.com to check my mail.

The solution to this problem is downloading the Gmail java application files from the google servers here:
gm-Generic-Advanced_MIDP2.jad
gmail-g.jar
Then upload them to your phone using a data cable, and a J2ME media loader application like myJal. Depending on the software you use, you may have to rename the above files so that they have identical filenames (i.e. rename "gm-Generic-Advanced_MIDP2.jad" to "gmail-g.jad" - do not change the extensions!)

Once you load the files up to your phone "gmail" should appear in you Java applications folder. Clicking "gmail" will preform a short installation process, after which you will be prompted for your Gmail user-name and password. Once you enter your information, you'll be logged on to your Gmail account and able to read and write mail!

Image previews not showing up in konqueror and kFlickr

I just got a new digital camera, and was annoyed that for some odd reason, konqueror and kFlickr were no longer showing image previews for pictures taken with the new camera.

The solution for this problem was simple - apparently, konqueror has a configureable limit to the size of file it displays previews of. This setting can easily be changed in konqueror through:
Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Previews & Meta Data -> Maximum file size.

Turns out, that all the pictures from my 2 Mega Pixel cellphone camera were under 1MB in size, while the pictures from my new digital camera (set at 3 Mega Pixels) were just over 1MB. The default setting for previewable file size in my distribution was 1MB - hence the problem.

Changing the settings in konqueror also immediately solved the problem in kFlickr.