Ok, so Santa was kind to me last year and bought me a X50GL laptop and left me with the start screen of a clean Ubuntu install. Lovely.

Now I'm having a few problems with this,

the inbuilt camera is apparently not giving it's output to the normal location, only two programs can read from it (Eikga Softphone and Cheese Webcam Booth), I would like to know how to set it up properly.


The second issue is a bit more serious; I'm using a USB mouse and microphone, both from Logitech. Ubuntu seems to occasionaly think that when I right-click on something, say, a link to a webpage, I may not want to open a tab at all, but view it's propeities or dump it straight into an email from Thunderbird. This is very annoying as when it does this it dosent even open the right click menu sometimes.

The Microphone fails to be read at all by every program I've tried, and now the rather poorly placed built-in mic isnt working either, very odd...

Another niggling problem I've got is reading DVDs, I've gone through all the DVD HowTos, and whilst I can run Reigon 1 DVDs, I cannot read Region 2 DVDs, despite myself and the store to which I bought it from being bought in the UK. (Live CD has no trouble running DVDs, after install, things get messed up)

Final problem; telling the machine to shut off means I have to wait when Ubuntu has finished unloading itself until I press and hold down the power button (force power off)

If anyone can help and assist in removing my New Year Blues, I'd be very grateful.

What's the "normal location" you refer to? My point is that obviously, you can use it with dedicated software; what else exactly do you expect?

This happens (from my experience) when you click and move away the mouse pointer too quickly and let go of the button in the process; depending on your position on the screen, you may highlight (without even really noticing it) the menu item for "Send Link". I have experienced that myself - it was (sometimes still is) my fault.

Have you checked all the options to set devices you have available when you open Volume Control and look in the menu? Additionally, the mics may be muted by default.

The latter's more astonishing than the former, in fact; have you looked through what Synaptic has to offer if you search for "DVD play"? Maybe something's still missing, especially if you installed some tools but didn't use the meta packages available.

Some acpi problem - do
for messages; you may have to add "acpi=off" to your boot line in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but that's sort of a last resort since it can cause other problems (like cripple powersaving or hibernation). I'm no expert on this - though I sometimes experience similar problems with an older laptop, but they're not consistent and hard to track.

To know more, the output of lspci might be very helpful.

M.