Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx will probably be released in a few days. Time for me to update my machines to the previous version
9.10 Karmic Koala. On my Thinkpad, this was easy going, although it took me quite some time, because I was coming from 8.10 and had to upgrade to 9.04 first.
Not so with my
Samsung NC10. After upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10, I couldn't set display brightness anymore. Neither by
Fn-Keys, nor by the Ubuntu Brightness Applet. Bummer! Searching the net, I found a couple of very useful hints. It figured out, that I had to update the firmware on my NC10 netbook. Which is pretty straight forward if running a Microsoft Windows operating system on the it. Which apparently mine had never experienced: right after the purchase,
I installed OpenSolaris on it, which was replaced by Ubuntu 9.04 a few weeks later due to several reasons.
Turns out, that 11CA is the latest firmware version available at the
Samsung NC10 support web site. Coming as MS-DOS EXE, which is pretty useless in Linux. Then I googled a
a very useful blog entry about flashing directly from Linux. This entry also offers a ROM image of the 11CA firmware, which can be used smoothly by the
flashrom utility. After installing
flashrom and downloading the ROM file, things went straight forward on Linux as well. Don't forget a backup of your running firmware:
root@ra:~# flashrom -r ~/nc10_orig_bios.rom
flashrom v0.9.1-r706
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH7M", enabling flash write... OK.
This chipset supports the following protocols: SPI.
Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found chip "Macronix MX25L1605" (2048 KB, SPI) at physical address 0xffe00000.
Reading flash... done.
Then write the new firmware ROM image into the flash:
root@ra:~# flashrom -w ./NC10-11CA.rom
flashrom v0.9.1-r706
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH7M", enabling flash write... OK.
And hey! After a reboot, both the GNOME brightness applet as well as the
Fn-Keys for controlling display brightness are working in Ubuntu 9.10. Neat!
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