Timsweb

In the dying seconds of Gordon Browns HCI scheme, I managed to get myself a pretty laptop. It came with Windows XP home installed, but I fancied trying my hand at something a little different. So along came Ubuntu to see if it was up to the task to dealing with the worst kind of user.

The worst kind of user? That’s right! I am that man. I have a degree in computer science, and therefore think that I have the ability to fix any problems that I may have. I’ll charge into every file in /etc making any changes that I think will help. Then after 10 mins of that I’ll have broken it. See all other users will fall into 2 other categories. They are either too scared to make the changes that break the system, or they are smarter than me, and the changes they make won’t acutally break anything.

Initial installation and hardware problems

I started off installing Breezy. Out the tin, it installed, let me log in and generally potter around using my laptop to do most things. There where however a couple of problems.

First problem was the screen. It wouldn’t go at the resolution that I wanted it to (1280×800). Looking at dmesg hinted that it didn’t have that resolution I wanted as a supported mode. As it turned out, this was a problem with the intel 915M (I think it was) chipset. Installing and setting up a program called 855resolution fixed that problem.

The next problem was the wifi. The laptop had a broadcom chipst BCM4318 I think. This didn’t work out the tin, and I needed to use ndiswrapper to get it to work. Best bet is to go with the drivers that they say you should on the ndiswrapper page. I tried downloading some from dell, but they didn’t seem to work. I might have got the wrong ones.

Once wifi was working. I installed network manager to let me roam between networks. I have 3 that I regually use. At home, Maz’s (my gf) and work. Home uses WPA, but thats a whole load more setting up.

The last of the hardware problems was the headphone jack. When pluggin it in, it wouldn’t mute the laptop speakers. This was a big problem in my eyes. Espically when using the laptop at work. The problem was fixed in the latest version of alsa, but I wanted to keep my distro as clean as I could. Me manually installing the latest alsa would probably break it. As meantioned earlier. I’m good at that. This lead to me taking the pluge and updating my repo’s to Dapper.

After updating everything to dapper

Once I was up to dapper versions, many things imrpoved for me. The headpone jack problem was now fixed, and the art work was nice. BUT, to my horror, my wifi no longer worked. The problem was that the broadcom driver had been cracked (not very well for my chipset though), and a new driver was being loaded. This driver was called bcm43xx, and it clashed with ndiswrapper.

To fix this, I added “blacklist bcm43xx” to /etc/modprob.d/blacklist and “ndiswrapper” to /etc/modprobe.d/modules. After that, things kinda worked, but network manager would run, but not display on the applet panel. This was another easy fix, but it took someone from the ubuntu irc channel to tell me what to do. Basically, you hand over all control of your interfaces to network manager and DON’T try to do any of it manually with /etc/networking/interfacecs. Inface you should comment out all lines except:

Once you done that, restart dbus (/etc/init.d/dbus restart), log out and back in again and bobs your uncle.

Now the newer version of Network Manager that you get in Dapper has one major difference that really made life easier for me…support for WPA. Now rather than me messing around with config files manually starting and stopping the deamon, Network Manager handles all that for me. Now a WPA network is no harder than a WEP network. Great!

Things that still need improving

See I think that the extra improvemts in dapper are great. But there are just a couple of things that could do with improving. Now these are little things, but improvements none the less.

First off, is shutting down features. Basically the following happens. I’m impacient as well as lazy, and I’ll click hibernate, wait a couple of seconds and shut the lid. Come back to it later and open the lid again. Whats happened was it went into suspend (from shutting the lid) while it was doing the hibernate process. When I open it aagin, it finishes hibernating. I would like it to continue to hibernate after I shut the lid. It must be possible, as this behaviour was as it was in Breezy.

Next is to do with nextwork manager. Some people would like to give themselves a static IP on a network. It seems that network manager doesn’t have a facility to allow you to specify this. If it does, I haven’t found it, but I don’t need it yet so I haven’t looked that hard.

Another one with network manager, is that as I launch my computer, it asks me multiple times for the keyring password. I think once is enough.
Now I think thats about it. I could mention the lack of mp3 support and codecs by default. But thats not the Ubuntu teams fault.

Dapper isn’t due for official release until the start of July, but I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen. Next step though, see if it’s worth getting XGL set up..it might not, the graphics acceleration on this laptop are pretty poor.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 at 11:13 am and is filed under Tech Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.