LifeOverflow

I thought I would test Windows 7 on my old Toshiba M105 laptop but I was surprised to find out that Windows 7 did not install my audio driver automatically. The motherboard contains a Realtek ALC861 chip and so I started to look for the drivers.

It turns out that Toshiba does not provide support for Windows 7 for laptops manufactured prior to 2007. Sadly I belonged to that category. Although I found the driver on Realtek website at this link there were a couple of interesting things about the driver issue.


Firstly, Bing returned much more valuable results for the most search queries related to the issue than Google. This was surprising that I normally use Google but just decided to try Bing after not finding the required stuff after a couple of searches at Google. If nothing else, this incident would definitely make me try Bing search more often than I used to.


Secondly, I also installed Ubuntu 9.10 on the same laptop and to my surprise, Ubuntu automatically installed the driver for my laptop. This was a good experience with Ubuntu specially with the drivers. I remember that with most distros I had to manually install it. Good going Ubuntu

Ever since I set up my other laptop with ubuntu 9.10, things have been kinda weird with it. My initial work was to get started with some testing work on JGroups and so I set up eclipse and got started on the project. To my surprise, eclipse was behaving really weird on ubuntu 9.10. Basically, it would no detect mouse clicks!!!

It was hard to imagine a problem wit mouse clicks. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it would  just select the button and sometimes not even that. I got used to using the tab key to select the buttons. Then I started to sought out the problem for once. So this is the solution.

 

1. Create a start script for eclipse. Call it startEclipse.sh. The contents of the script should be

#!/bin/sh

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

<path to your eclipse directory>/eclipse

 

2. Give the script execute permissions

chmod 777 startEclipse.sh

 

3. Starting eclipse using this script resolves the issues with the UI.