new vista laptop

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Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2007 9:31 pm

Actually it's a refurb, model M3705, with a dual core and 1 gig of RAM. Got it for the wife when I get back to Europe in the fall.

However as Vista is IDLEING along at 30% CPU usage and around 700 megs of RAM usage this puppy has an instant rendezvous with Ubuntu. Now I do tech support for a living and have gone though all of the Tech Republic tutorials on tweaking Vista to lean it down to the point where it is simply a bloated pig, with issues. However as I like to come home and relax with my laptops I�m installing Ubuntu on it.

So, if anyone is interested I�ll post the steps I needed to go through to get Ubuntu going on the laptop with DVD movie playing, music, office suite, Web Browsing email and so on. In short everything that the average computer user needs to work.

Let me know if you are interested.

Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2007 10:45 pm

Actually, I'd be interested if you could help me install Ubuntu on my desktop (dual w/ XP as I gotta play my Battlefield 2!). My problem is that I have a 8800GTS (640mb) card and the live cd won't work because of the card. Any tips? Google hasn't been my friend on this one. Sad

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 12:39 am

^^^^ I'll give it a try. First I need to finish getting on-line. Need to find drivers for the RTL8185L. Very Happy

Edit Note:

Okay, running in Ububtu with CPU usage around 3% and memory usage around 12%. Much faster and more responsive. Very Happy

Now I'm going to spend the rest of the evening getting it set up for movies and music.

^^^^^ OD take a look at http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3777&highlight=8800GTS and see if that helps.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Yes please. That would be very useful.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 10:26 am

Thanks for the link. It doesn't say anything about Ubuntu, so I assume there is no "easy fix" for it still. For as good as I am in Windows, I'm the complete opposite in Linux. I would have no idea on how to do anything in the console like it is saying. I think I will just wait a while until the devs of Ubuntu release an updated version that works with the 8 series cards. Until then, I'll just have to setup my xbox (gutted it and put regular pc guts into it) which has Ubuntu on it.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

^^^ When it starts to boot, it sits at a GRUB: prompt for about one second. During that second start to type "VGA=normal". I'm not sure if you would also need the name of the boot file there too, but there's a good chance it will take the default, and I can't tell you what that is.

That's not console stuff, but you will be happier, especially with Ubuntu, if you get familiar with the command line and configuration files and stuff.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 12:36 pm

Well, Right now I am tracking down a sound problem with the ATI SB450 card. after that I'll start posting the How To. Is it worth it? Yes! Very Happy

There is absolutely no comparison between running this laptop in Ubuntu and Vista. Boot up times are faster and multitasking doesn't bog down the system.

@OD I'll take a look at that link in more detail later. Most linux 'fixes' do not have to be distribution specific.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 6:26 pm

@OD

Try this linky
http://www.albertomilone.com/latest_nvidia_udsf_feisty.html

Good luck

For all other stuff I recommend http://easylinux.info/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty

God I'm glad someone started this thread. I was one the point of threadjacking Ginchs Windoze help thread with a " bin windows, use linux" mini rant! Very Happy

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 6:36 pm

Thanks for the link, but I can't use it.

Quote:

REQUIREMENTS

1) an installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 system (don't try it on a livecd)

I can't even get it to install because of my '8800' series Nvidia card. I can't even use the live cd with it. I'm at work now, so I can't tell you the exact error, but it said something about 'kernal' and 'video'.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 9:46 pm

If you don't mind a text-mode install, you could get the Alternate Install CD from Here (64-Bit) or Here (32-Bit)

It's not as pretty, and you wont get to play with the live system first, but it's still easy to follow.

Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 10:33 am

I downloaded (but haven't burned) the alternate cd. How hard is it to set it up w/ dual boot doing a text install? The GUI regular install is very nice.

Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 1:01 pm

Setting up the dual boot itself is just a case of saying "OK" when it tells you it finds that you've got Windows installed.

The only trickier bit you might find in text mode (especially if you haven't done it before) is partitioning your disk. If you need a hand, send me a PM and I'll do my best to help you out.

Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 7:21 pm

I'm going back to XP. I can't play my BF2142 Sad

BF2 runs decent, and all the nicey looky ats aren't worth it.

Vista is nothing more than a repackaged Windows ME.

Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 5:29 am

Well that was fun. Rolling Eyes

Seems that the Intel high def audio chip is not yet supported. So I spent the last few days pouring over the forums and reinstalling a number of times. Currently I can listen to movies and music through my USB speakers and headset but not the built in speakers in the laptop. However it is worth pointing out that even with all of that aggaravation it never occurred to me to go back to vista.

Usually I install Linux on slighter older hardware. I find that Linux is much less resource intensive and will will happily operate on a machine that would slow to a standstill after the required updates and patches from Microsoft. Computers that are a couple of years old usually have all of the hardware issues worked out before you install.

So if anyone wants to give it a try, Very Happy

Highly recommended, read on.

First thing to do is to go to http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/desktopedition and take a look at the different versions that are available. This is worth mentioning for a couple of reasons.

I still have a few P3 laptops around and I would recommend installing Xubuntu on that class of hardware. Xubuntu "is intended for users with less-powerful computers, or those that require a highly efficient desktop environment on faster systems."

When I set up a laptop for my son, 4 at the time, I used Edubuntu on a P3 Dell. Edubuntu "Edubuntu is a officailly supported derivative of Ubuntu that is customised for Education use." If you are setting up a computer for your kids this would be a fun way to start.

Most other installs can be done using either of Ubuntu or Kubuntu. Kubuntu being Ubuntu with th KDE desktop instead of the Gnome desktop. In my opinion there isn't enough difference in the usability between the desktops to matter much.

In short; go to http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/desktopedition chose a version and download it. Smile

After you download it you will have a file of around 700 megs. The file will be an ISO file and is a disk image. I prefer to use Nero to burn disks but any disk burning app will work fine. If you don't think your computer has disk burning software on it go to www.download.com and search for �iso burn� change the license filter to free and there will be a number of free disk burning utilities to use.

After you have created your disk, remove it, and turn off your computer. Restart your computer and enter the BIOS section. The BIOS section is where you can set many hardware options for your computer and is usually accessible by pressing F2 or F10 when your computer first starts. In here we want to look for the section that says boot order, or similar, and chose CD as the first device to start from. Save, usually F10, and exit.

Now your computer will restart and if you put your new CD in the drive you will be prompted to boot from the CD. Chose yes and you will end up running Ubuntu on your computer off the CD. At this point nothing has been written to your computer and you can take it for a test drive. Running off the cd is much slower than an installed version so I would recommend installing it as soon as you are comfortable. To start just click on the Install Icon and the process will begin. The installation routine will ask a few simple questions and then begin.

As I almost always use a dedicated machine I just chose the take over disk choice. However if you are planning to set up a dual boot machine make sure you have backed up everything that's important.

You will shortly have a new Linux OS. Smile

Next I'll review what I did to customize my system. Installing software from the Add/remove tool, synaptic and good old apt-get. using NDISwrapper for wireless drivers. Tools for writing to NTFS partitions, Prelink to speed up application load times and speeding up disk access with hdparm.

All of which is very simple. Really.

Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 8:14 am

Stoker

Best of luck with ndiswrapper. I hear it can be a bitch!! ( my laptop uses a Cisco Aironaut PCMIA card which is supported out of the box-lovely!)

Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 12:42 pm

^^ In my experience ndiswrapper has been pretty easy to use. Even after some wireless cards are recognized and a Linux native driver is loaded using ndiswrapper can give improved performace.

In this case it was the first thing I did. Ubuntu did not recognize my wireless card So I ID'd it as a RTL8185L and Googled rtl8185l ubuntu. Went to the first post and found instructions. Wink

And that really is one of the key parts to making Linux work. Use the Forums. There are thousands of people working on the same problem usually.

So in this case I just opened up a Terminal, Windows users would call this a DOS prompt, and litteraly did a cut-n-paste of the instructions.

Quote:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 ndiswrapper-common
wget ftp://209.216.61.149/cn/wlan/x86-8185\(1094\).zip
unzip x86-8185\(1094\).zip
sudo ndiswrapper -i net8185.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -l
sudo ndiswrapper -m
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
iwconfig
Go to System>Administration>Networking to configure your interface (wlan0)

This is all of the command line steps needed to install the ndiswrapper for the laptops Wifi. The total extent of my programming skill needed was to copy each line into my terminal window and then hit the enter key. Very Happy

Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 1:07 pm

I found something similar when trying to set up my "xbox" with a dlink usb wireless. Didn't work for me though. I got it to work by rearranging my router and modem (to the downstairs) and plugging it in directly w/ cat5. My windows gaming machine upstairs now uses wireless to connect.

Odd thing though. I now have my "xbox" (uses an AMD 2500+ mobile) running Ubuntu and a AMD X2 3800 (wife's machine) next to each other, both hard wired to the router. I went to speedtest.org and ran it on both machines. Wife's box got about 7k for download. Not bad considering our service is 10k. But every time I run the "xbox" I get in the 12k+ range. Is Ubuntu that streamlined?

Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 3:25 pm

@Stoker
I have to agree with you that the online help available for linux ( and ubuntu in particular) are world class.

Thats the beauty of open source software, everybody can see whats happening under the bonnet and can analyse the output from terminal. Very Happy