Touch pad wasin't responding for Dell Inspiron 17 - 7547

When instiall Ubuntu 12.04 on Dell 15 Inspiron machine, the fancy touch pad wasn't working. After some research the suggested fix was to update the kernel:

the current Kernel was:

$uname -r

3.13.1


To update to a newer Kernel (I read that 3.17 or 3.18 solved this problem) we do the following (64-Bit):

$ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.18.1-vivid/linux-headers-3.18.1-031801_3.18.1-031801.201412170637_all.deb

$ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.18.1-vivid/linux-headers-3.18.1-031801-generic_3.18.1-031801.201412170637_amd64.deb

$ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.18.1-vivid/linux-image-3.18.1-031801-generic_3.18.1-031801.201412170637_amd64.deb

$ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.18.1*.deb linux-image-3.18.1*.deb  ## to install the Kernel

$ sudo update-grub   ## to update grup to fetch the new Kernel
$ sudo reboot

It worked like magic. How ever, the "right click" is still an issue, you can over come it by the double touch (two fingers at the same time). This gie the same effect as a right click. 




Source: http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/how-to-install-upgrade-linux-kernel-3181-in-ubuntu

Reloading voice credentials for UBUNTU

Sometimes, after long hourse of usage, I lose the voice in my laptop. Here is a nice fix. 

$pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload

Mergin /home and / in UBUNTU

After install ubuntu on the DELL machine (see last post). I noticed that the home drive was limited to only 8GB, while the root (/) directory had over 400GB size. The solution was to merge them both.

I followed this link (the section after the partitioning is the relevant one).

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving