# Working with Hardware Devices

&legalnotice;

Your computer consists of a number of connected devices, which are collectively known as computer hardware.

Ubuntu normally configures your hardware automatically, but there may be occasions when you need to make changes to hardware settings yourself. This section provides information on tools which can be used to configure your hardware.

## Proprietary drivers

Some devices attached to your computer may need proprietary drivers to be installed in order to work properly.

### Why are some drivers proprietary?

Proprietary drivers are drivers for your hardware which are not freely available or open-source.

Most of the devices (hardware) attached to your computer should function properly in Ubuntu. These devices are likely to have free drivers, which means that the drivers can be modified by the Ubuntu developers and problems with them can be fixed.

Some hardware does not have free drivers, usually because the hardware manufacturer has not released details of their hardware which would make it possible to create such a driver. These devices may have limited functionality or may not work at all.

If a proprietary driver is available for a certain device, you can install it in order to allow your device to function properly, or to add new features. For example, installing a proprietary driver for certain graphics cards may allow you to use more advanced visual effects.

Some computers may not have any devices which can use proprietary drivers, either because all of the devices are fully supported by free drivers or because no proprietary drivers are yet available for the device.

Proprietary drivers are often maintained by the hardware manufacturer, and so cannot be modified by Ubuntu developers if there is a problem.

### Enabling a proprietary driver

To use a proprietary driver for a device:

- Press &jockey;.

- Find the driver which you would like to enable and read the description.

- Press Activate to enable the driver. You may be asked to enter your password.

- The proprietary driver may have to be downloaded and installed.

- You may need to restart your computer to finish enabling the driver.

### Disabling a proprietary driver

If a proprietary driver is causing problems, or you would just like to turn it off, follow the procedure below:

- Press &jockey;.

- Find the driver which you would like to disable and read the description.

- Press Remove to disable the driver and continue using a free driver, if available. You may be asked to enter your password.

- You may need to restart your computer to finish disabling the driver.

## Disks and partitions

This section provides instructions on how to handle disks and drives, such as removable hard disks.

### Checking how much disk space is available

Click &system-monitor; and select the File Systems tab to see how much hard disk space is available on your computer.

Alternatively, click &computer;, right-click a hard disk, click Properties and select the Basic tab to see a summary of the disk space currently available on that disk.

#### Advanced disk-usage analysis

For a more accurate analysis of your filesystem, press &baobab; to start the Disk Usage Analyzer.

Press Scan Home to scan your home directory, or press Scan Filesystem to scan the whole filesystem.

See the Disk Usage Analyzer Manual for more information.

### How can I free-up some disk space?

There are several simple ways of making more disk space available:

- Empty your trash by right-clicking the Trash icon on the bottom panel and selecting Empty the Trash folder.

- Run Computer Janitor by clicking &computer-janitor;. This will remove unused or obsolete software packages from your computer. Read the list of packages carefully before you click Cleanup; packages that you have manually downloaded and installed may be listed as unused, even though they are not.

- Remove software packages that you no longer use. See Add/Remove Applications for information on removing packages.

- Delete files that you no longer need. You can use the Disk Usage Analyzer (&baobab;) to find which files are taking up the most space. Be careful not to delete files that you still need!

You can also compress and archive your old, rarely-used documents:

- Select the files and folders that you want to compress, right-click one of them and select Create Archive.

- Choose a name, location and format for the file (the `.tar.gz` format is the most commonly used on Ubuntu, `.zip` is compatible with Windows and `.tar.lzma` usually offers the best compression).

- Click Create. An archive file will be created containing compressed copies of your files.

- Delete the old uncompressed files to free some disk space.

### Partitioning a device

You can use &gnome-partition-editor; to partition storage devices. Install the gparted package and then press &gparted; to start the partition editor.

Be careful when altering disk partitions, as it is possible to lose your data if you delete or change the wrong partition.

#### Freeing space for a new partition

To create a new partition inside an already partitioned device, you must first resize an existing partition. If you already have free space, skip to ; otherwise, follow the instructions below:

1. Press &gparted;.

2. Select the device to partition from the drop-down list at the top-right of the main window.

3. A list of partitions will appear. Select the desired partition and choose Partition Unmount .

4. To resize the partition choose Resize/Move. The dialog Resize/Move will be shown. You can use the Free Space Following (MiB) box to choose how much space to free after this partition, or Free Space Preceding (MiB) to free space before this partition. Alternatively you can use the slider to adjust the partition size.

5. To apply the changes, click Resize/Move.

#### Creating a new partition

To create a new partition:

1. Select the device to partition from the drop-down list at the top-right of the main window.

2. A list of partitions will appear. Select the one called unallocated and click New.

3. From the Filesystem drop-down list choose the desired type of filesystem to use and click Add.

4. To apply all the changes made, click Apply.

### Formatting a partition

You can use &gnome-partition-editor; to format disk partitions (see for more information on &gnome-partition-editor;).

To format a partition, do as follows:

1. Press &gparted;.

2. Select the device to partition from the drop-down list at the top-right of the main window.

3. A list of partitions will appear. Select the desired partition and choose Partition Unmount .

4. Select the partition you want to format and choose Partition Format to and select from the list the type of filesystem to format the partition to.

5. To apply all the changes made, click Apply.

Pressing Apply will cause all of the files on the partition to be permanently deleted.

### What is formatting?

To format a hard disk, device or partition means to prepare that particular device to be used for storing data.

The operation of formatting a hard disk or partition is when a specific data-storage format is applied to that device; this format is the filesystem.

When you buy a disk it is usually not formatted, and cannot yet be used for storing data. When you format the device, you will notice that the free space on it is less than the original size. This is due to the fact that some space has to be used to make the device usable; this space is occupied by the filesystem. Also, disk manufacturers often use a different standard to measure disk capacity, which results in a further discrepancy.

### What is a filesystem?

A filesystem is a particular way of storing and organizing files on a storage device such as a hard disk, and is an important part of an operating system. Without a filesystem, accessing and storing files would be difficult.

There are different types of filesystem. The most common are:

- ext2, ext3, and ext4: these are usually found on GNU/Linux operating systems. Ubuntu uses ext4 as its default filesystem.

- FAT16 and FAT32: these are Microsoft Windows filesystems found on older computers. If you would like to share data between two computers, the FAT32 format is a good choice.

- NTFS: this is the filesystem type used by more modern versions of Microsoft Windows.

- HFS+: this is the Mac OS X default filesystem type.

### What is a Partition?

A partition is a means of dividing the storage capacity of a device, such as a hard disk, into several parts which can then be treated as separate storage devices (logical devices).

Each logical device is seen by the operating system as a distinct device, and thus is treated as an independent disk.

Partitioning a hard disk can be done for several reasons:

- To retrieve free space

- To install different operating systems

- To better organize data on the hard disk

### Mounting and Unmounting Devices

When you connect a removable storage device to your computer, it must be mounted by the operating system so that you are able to access the files on the device.

To find out how to mount and unmount storage devices, see Using Removable Media

When you copy files to a storage device, they are not always written to the device immediately. Instead, they are often stored in a queue so that they can all be transferred across to the device at the same time (for reasons of efficiency). If you disconnect the device before all of the files have been transferred, then you could lose the files. To prevent this, you must always unmount a storage device before disconnecting it.

partition partitions
partitioning
format formatting
mount
unmount umount
filesystem file system

## Laptops

This section contains information for people using Ubuntu on a laptop computer.

### Power management settings

You may wish to change the power management settings of your laptop in order to help extend its battery life and reduce energy wastage.

- Press &power-management;.

- Change the settings as appropriate. Changes are applied instantly.

Displaying a screensaver may use more power than simply letting the screen go blank. Turning off the screensaver could slightly improve the battery life of your laptop.

- Press &screensaver;.

- Change the Screensaver theme to Blank screen. This will simply display a blank screen as a screensaver.

When your laptop is running on battery, one of the biggest drains on power is the display. Turning the brightness of the display down could improve battery life significantly; many laptops allow you to do this by pressing Fn F7 several times.

### Touchpads

Most laptop computers come with a touchpad, which is used to control the mouse pointer. There are many ways of changing the way that the touchpad behaves; the most basic touchpad settings can be configured in the following way.

- Press &mouse;.

- Select the Touchpad tab.

- Here you can change the touchpad settings to your liking. Changes should take effect immediately.

Some touchpads may be detected as normal mouse devices, even though they are actually touchpads. In this case, the Touchpad tab will not be available in the mouse preferences.

More advanced touchpad configuration options are available using the gsynaptics utility.

- Install the gsynaptics package.

- Access the utility from &gsynaptics;.

- There are a number of different tabs here with various options for adjusting touchpad behavior.

See the community support pages for more information on touchpads.

### Finding laptop testing reports

Many laptops are regularly tested by the Ubuntu community to ensure that various features work correctly. The results of these tests are available for you to read, and may offer insight into any problems you might be experiencing with your laptop.

- See the Laptop Testing community support pages for a full listing of available laptop tests.

You can participate in laptop testing yourself by contacting the Laptop Testing Team.

## Suspending and hibernating your computer

In order to save power, you can put your computer into one of a number of power-saving modes when you are not using it:

- Suspending a computer is like putting the computer to sleep. The computer will still be turned on and all of your work will be left open, but it will use much less power. You can wake the computer by pressing a key or clicking the mouse.

- Hibernating is turning the computer off completely while saving the current state of the computer (such as keeping all of your open documents). When you turn the computer back on after hibernating, all of your work should be restored as it was before hibernation. No power is used when the computer is hibernating.

- Shutting down is turning the computer off completely, without saving the current state of the computer. No power is used when the computer is shut down.

- Resuming is bringing the computer out of a power saving mode and back into normal operation. You can resume the computer from being suspended by pressing a keyboard button or by clicking the mouse. You can resume from being hibernated by pressing the power button on your computer.

You can manually put your computer into a power-saving mode by pressing the User Switcher in the top right hand corner of the screen and then pressing the appropriate button.

Some computers may have problems going into certain power saving modes. The best way of checking if your computer can handle a power-saving mode is to try to switch to that mode and see if it behaves as you expected. Always make sure you save important documents before suspending or hibernating.

### My computer does not suspend or hibernate correctly

Some computers are unable to suspend or hibernate correctly with Ubuntu. If this is the case for your computer, you may notice some of the following symptoms:

- The computer does not turn off after you click to hibernate it.

- When you turn the computer on after hibernating it, your previously open programs are not restored.

- The computer will not wake up after you have suspended it.

- Certain programs or hardware devices stop working correctly after resuming from hibernation or waking-up from being suspended.

If you suffer from any of these problems, you should report a bug to Launchpad. The problems will hopefully be fixed in a subsequent version of Ubuntu.

If your hardware does not work properly after suspending or hibernating your computer, restart your computer and it should return to normal. If a program does not work properly, try closing the program and then starting it again.

Make sure that you save all of your open documents before testing for suspend and hibernate problems.

### Why do I get a strange pattern on the screen when I hibernate my computer?

Your screen may show a black and white pattern just after you click to hibernate your computer. This is usually nothing to worry about and is just how the graphics cards of some computers respond to the initial stages of the hibernation process.

If the computer displays the pattern for a prolonged period of time without turning itself off then you may have a problem with hibernation. See My computer does not suspend or hibernate correctly for more information.

## Mice and keyboards

This section provides instructions on using and configuring mice, keyboards and other input devices to make them more comfortable for you to use.

### Mice and other pointing devices

You can change numerous options related to your mouse, such as how fast the pointer moves and how clicks are interpreted by the computer.

- Mouse Skills

  Information on basic mouse skills, such as pointing, clicking and dragging.

- Mouse Preferences

  Instructions on how to change various settings related to your mouse, such as whether the mouse is left-handed and how fast the pointer moves.

- Accessibility - Configuring the Mouse

  Information on changing mouse preferences for users of assistive technologies.

### Keyboards

There are many options related to your keyboard which you can change, such as the keyboard language and keyboard shortcuts.

- Basic Keyboard Skills

  Information on basic keyboard usage.

- Keyboard Preferences

  Change settings related to your keyboard, such as the layout of the keyboard.

- Keyboard Indicator

  The manual of the Keyboard Indicator, which allows you to change between different keyboard layouts.

- Accessibility - Configuring the Mouse and Keyboard

  Information on configuring the mouse and keyboard for users of assistive technologies.

- Using the Keyboard to Navigate the Desktop

  A guide on how to navigate the desktop using only a keyboard.

- Keyboard Accessibility Monitor

  The manual of the Keyboard Accessibility Monitor, which shows the status of any keyboard accessibility features which are turned on.

- Using the Character Palette

  Use the Character Palette to insert letters and symbols which are not on your keyboard.

### Touchpads and graphics tablets

You can use a touchpad or graphics tablet to move a mouse pointer.

- Touchpads

  Information on changing the settings of a laptop touchpad.