Knocking out the little things with my ZaReason Verix 547

So, as I've detailed in prior posts, I'm running Kubuntu 14.10 on a new Verix 547 laptop from ZaReason, a vendor and integrator in Berkeley.  So far it's been going well, but there are niggles to deal with, of course.  Even ZaReason, which specifically configures and supports Linux on the machines they sell, has problems with some functionality on this laptop.  Just goes to show the power of OEMs that only test and guarantee operation on Windows - such a hassle!!

Here are some of the issues I've had out of the box with the Verix:

1. lightdm absolutely refuses to show the greeter (login) screen.  I can still log in and it starts up a Plasma session, meaning the keyboard is active and the greeter is detecting my keystrokes and parsing the password, but the greeter is blank.
2. There are intermittent pauses in the touchpad operation.  At random times the touchpad will simply cease accepting input.
3. Sometimes the desktop environment (Plasma/KWin) would become corrupted and unresponsive after a resume from suspend.
4. I can't get audio to output to the HDMI port.

Some of these I've already managed to get around.  Woo-hoo!  Thank you, Interwebz!!  Specifically:

1. After searching for days and trying many hacks, lightdm was still always showing a blank screen for a greeter.  The strangest thing was that I could still type my password, press enter, and then the splash would come up and the desktop environment (Plasma) launched fine.  This would happen whenver the greeter was shown, such as logging out and relogging in.  However, the screen locker was fine - resuming from suspend would show the password field.
   
   After a LOT of fiddling around and searching, I knew that the problem was related to X and not to the touchpad.  For example, I could tap the pad and move the cursor outside the password field, and suddenly typing and pressing <enter> wouldn't log me in.
   
   Also, I didn't see any errors in the X or lightdm log.  Nothing that screamed "Hey, I can't display myself!".  I found a post that describes dealing with black screen issues with NVIDIA Prime systems.  It referred specifically to 14.04, but it talked about the same problem - booting up into a black screen with keyboard active and switching to a VT.
   
   The post was mainly concerned with corrupt xorg.conf's that were being rewritting by 'gpu-manager', which I don't appear to have running on my system.  BUT, when I compared their "correct" xorg.conf to my own conf file, I noticed something interesting.  They included this option in the Intel device section:
   
   

   Section "Device"
       Identifier "intel"
       Driver "modesetting"
   EndSection

   
   The "modesetting" driver was something I hadn't seen before.  Here was my xorg.conf, autogenerated by nvidia-xconfig:
   
   

   Section "Device"
       Identifier "intel"
       Driver "intel"
       BusID "PCI:0@0:2:0"
       Option "AccelMethod" "SNA"
   EndSection
   

   
   Mine was a tad different - notice the "intel" driver, but that's really it.  Everything else is just extra specification.  So, I modified the driver to go from "intel" to "modesetting" and... VOILA!  I can see the lightdm greeter now!  It's not pretty - very barebones, but it works!  I assume I can hack on the theme (background, etc.) to make it nicer.

This post is a little longer than I expected, so I'll address the other issues in subsequent posts.