Installing and Configuring Ubuntu on a Laptop
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4
Touchpad
The base features of the touchpad worked without any effort. The only nonworking feature I would like to conquer is the vertical scroll area. I found a reference on a Ubuntu forum that indicates the touchpad drivers may be broken. I haven't felt like compiling the drivers and getting it working yet, though.
DVD+/-R
So far, I have burned only a couple of CDs and data DVDs. Both work very well from Nautilus (Gnome's filesystem explorer). I even noticed when I right-click on an .iso file within Nautilus, it displays a "Write to disc" option. I will have to try that out one day.
FireWire
FireWire did not work initially, giving me a "Could not open device raw1394" error. After a bit of Googling, the answer was so obvious that I should have at least guessed the problem. The permissions on the file /dev/raw1394 were 600 with an ownership of root:video. My user was in the video group, but /dev/raw1394 was not group-writable. I did a chmod 666 /dev/1394 (overkill, I know) and it started working. Because that worked, I put the same command in /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh.
Suspend
I read the web site of someone who has suspend to RAM working on this exact laptop, but it isn't working for me. His modified ACPI scripts seem to suspend my laptop, but when I try to restore, I just get a black screen staring at me and have to reboot. When I get a little more time and a little more motivation, I'll hack his scripts and see if I can get them working for my system.
I have tried suspend to disk only once. The Ubuntu suspend scripts shut the machine down and resumed to my desktop. Unfortunately, networking was totally hosed, and nothing I could do would bring it back to life. I guess that is another thing to add to my to-do list.
Sound
I've had several situations where an application would fail to put out sound, but would work once I had killed the esd process. I have disabled sound at startup from the Gnome control center. Since doing that, I have had no problems with sound under Hoary.
Upgrading to Breezy
When Breezy (final) came out, I decided to upgrade. I'm typically a delete-and-reinstall-everything type of person, but this time I decided to live dangerously and do a system upgrade. I changed all references of hoary to breezy in my /etc/apt/sources.list, did apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade, and then just let it run. There were a couple of packages I had to uninstall manually because they caused my dist-upgrade to hang--one of which, if I remember correctly, was a wxPython package. Other than that, the upgrade process went very smoothly.
Having to uninstall one or two packages manually was a much cleaner upgrade path than I was hoping for. Still, I was nervous about booting into my "new" system. My nervousness quickly passed when I logged in to the beautiful Gnome 2.12 desktop. I was perhaps most excited about the new Removable Drives and Media Preferences settings that are new in Gnome 2.12. Rumors even suggested that my Canon Digital Rebel XT would have support. (By the way, it does, but it doesn't work exactly right.) Overall, the desktop experience is still excellent; even an improvement over the previous and excellent Gnome version.
Video was still at a stunning 1,920 by 1,200. AVIs played, and the quality was even better than it was previously. Somewhere between my initial installation of Hoary and this upgrade to Breezy, I had reverted to the Ubuntu repository version of the fglrx video drivers, so I upgraded with this upgrade attempt.
Sound didn't work exactly right. I was getting sound for some applications and not for others. Then, as I mentioned earlier, I remembered that I had shut off sound support at Gnome startup. I decided to change that and let Gnome manage my sound once again. After I did that, I haven't had a problem with sound--well, no worse a problem than is par for Linux sound. Sound is definitely an area where Linux needs some improvement. One problem I regularly encounter with sound is that I have to kill ESD if I want to use Audacity.
The wireless network works, but it restarts if I use BitTorrent or FTP large files from or to my laptop. One upside is that Intel has some folks working on the driver, an open source project for the driver, and a Bugzilla database; they appear to be making steady improvements in the driver. The other upside is that I no longer see the open bug description of the symptoms that I am having, so they may have fixed it.
Overall, I am extremely pleased with the upgrade. My system has no hint of the brokenness that I have previously associated with OS upgrades. Perhaps the reason that I typically choose to reinstall rather than upgrade is my experience with broken systems after upgrading. As an aside, Ubuntu is an excellently usable Linux distribution. I use it every day as my primary desktop at work and rarely find myself wishing for more.
Final Analysis
Overall, this is a great laptop. The price was extremely reasonable; it had the features I was looking for; and most features worked with little or no effort. Dell, however, has some room for improving its relations with the non-Windows community.
Jeremy Jones is a software engineer who works for Predictix. His weapon of choice is Python.
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Showing messages 1 through 6 of 6.
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Wireless WEP
2005-12-04 12:02:40 rg3000 [Reply | View]
I installed Ubuntu on my laptop. I have a gateway. Everything works great. It took awhile to get the wireless to work. Eventually I turned WEP off installed ndiswrapper and it finally worked. I too have the fn f2 key but it does not seem to have any function. My wireless indicator turns on during activity and that is all. I have not been able to activate WEP and keep my wireless connectivity
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Suspend to RAM
2005-11-22 06:13:05 asgeirn [Reply | View]
On my Thinkpad T42 with ATI hardware, I had to add acpi_sleep=s3_bios to fix the blank screen upon ACPI resume.
I got the tip from ThinkWiki, a place with useful information also for non-Thinkpad owners with the same hardware bits as Lenovo use.
http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_display_remaining_black_after_resume
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Few tips
2005-11-21 14:58:08 ivoks [Reply | View]
Modem is probably conexant and will work with conexant drivers (I use free version, since I use my modem onl for sending faxes). Be aware! That modem will report as SmartLink. But, it isn't :) (lspci -vvv will give you more information).
Suspend to RAM breaks probably cause you use ATI's drivers. Same thing happens with nvidia driver too, but nvidia provides solution for that. I would suggest using fglrx/nvidia drivers from ubuntu repository, not from vendor.
Touchpad will probably have all functions in dapper. For a period of time it had in Breezy, but driver was downgraded since it breaks more then fixes :)
For sound, install libsdl1.2debian-alsa and you will not ever have to kill esd. This is a bug, fixed for dapper (libsdl1.2debian-alsa should've been by default in breezy).
With ipw2200 i have no problems in Breezy (I had in Hoary) and for a wifi manager, try wifi-radar - daemon and a client.
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good article... but, you make it seem like this is hard...
2005-11-21 11:34:34 the_wanderer [Reply | View]
I've got a 3 year laptop, dell insprion 2600 if my memory is functioning to par this afternoon... I've installed hoary, breezy, and dapper (the 6.04 ubuntu dev release) all without issue. I've actually been running a server (wordpress blog :-) for a few weeks now.
what i'm saying is... why is the concept of an ubuntu laptop / linux laptop an issue at all? i guess i can understand the wifi support headaches ... ie ... get a prism2 card... but other than that... i've never even heard of a problem with laptop installs...
anyway... i'd suggest if you really need to check a laptop out, burn yerself a DSL (damn small linux) live disk and take it to your local bestbuy/compusa/frys and test the box out.
thanks for the article.
p@ - austin tx -
good article... but, you make it seem like this is hard...
2005-11-21 11:59:01 Jeremy Jones |
[Reply | View]
It certainly wasn't my intent to make it sound hard. It can be very easy, but it can also be a pain in the rear. My point was how good of a job Ubuntu does auto-configuring and coming with support for all the hardware in my laptop (and every piece of hardware I've had it on). Linux in the past has had its moments of being less than friendly for hardware recognition and auto-hardware-recognition. One of the things that makes Ubuntu so pleasant to use is that it makes configuration of hardware something you don't really have to think about.
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If you don't want to pay for MS Windows
2005-11-19 19:33:05 cyber_rigger [Reply | View]
The Dell link sucked. The machine only came with MS Windows.
Dell's attitude towards Linux sucks.
"Dell does not officially support running Linux on Dell laptops."
http://linux.dell.com/desktops.shtml
Here are some companies that sell preinstalled Linux and No-OS machines.
http://www.addonshop.com/
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
http://www.ibexpc.com/
http://www.linare.com/
http://www.linspire.com/
http://www.linuxcertified.com/
http://www.microtelpc.com/
http://www.outpost.com/
http://shoprcubed.com/
http://www.sub300.com/
http://www.systemax.com/divisions.htm
http://www.walmart.com/
http://www.xandros.com/
http://tuxmobil.org/reseller.html
http://www.us.debian.org/distrib/pre-installed
http://www.linux.org/vendor/system/index.html
http://tuxmobil.org/ (general information)
No OS
(Sabio made by Quanta, like Dell-latitudes)
http://www.avadirect.com/
http://www.asimobile.com/
http://www.powernotebooks.com/
