Installing Ubuntu in Two laptops
Picking up from where the previous post left: I have installed Ubuntu in 2 laptops - my personal laptop at home, and my presentation laptop at the lab.
First, the summary - for ubuntu 7.04
HP Compaq nx9005 - success.
HP Compac nc2400 - success - but needed to download some drivers for the wireless network adapter.
Now, the long story.
It has been a while that I wanted to replace the Windows in my lab laptop (the nc2400) with some sort of linux. Those usual windows problems were slowly creeping in, sometimes the computer would freeze during boot up, many times a row, and the system was slow and irresponsive. Since I use that laptop for conferences and presentations, I wanted a system that wouldn’t take much of my time with problems or fine tuning, or re-learning the location/design of system files. Also, I wanted to try something different from the Debian I always use. Ubuntu was the distro that fitted the bill the best, so I created an ISO disk, and installed it.
Installing ubuntu into my system was faster and more hands off than I expected. The ISO disc is actually a liveCD, instead of a pure installation disk - nice. You click on an icon in the desktop to actually start the installation. Almost no questions are asked. Your name, timezone, language, and that is about it. I asked to do the partitioning myself, but even that can be left to the installer.
That seems great for the common user, but I could have used an “expert installation” option to have more control over the installation procedure. Like choosing some of the initial packages, and the repositories and stuff. Anyway, the instalation left me with a completely functional system. The wireless network card was not working off the bat, but I did not expected it to be. Just a few minutes browsing the net gave me the link to the tutorial I needed. Following this step-by-step made the wireless card in my laptop work without problems:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff
After that, I decided to install ubuntu on my home laptop as well - It was a dual boot with debian unstable and windows. I was feeling that the linux partition was currently too small, and I was facing many problems with broken packages in unstable that I felt I did not have the time to deal with, so I decided to reinstall the system. Nothing particular of note, just did the installation procedure all over again.
Well, so how did it work out?
I realized that I really don’t like gnome as much as I like KDE. I didn’t knew about kubuntu when I was preparing the ISO. Gnome does seem to hide too much from the user. The terminal is not in a nice icon easily clickable, but buried beneath at least two levels of menus. There is not also an apparent way to run arbitrary programs (I found out later that alt+f2 does the job). Ubuntu 7.04 seems a bit too heavy for my nx9005 - I’ll have to experiment turning off some services for it, but my nc2400 handles it without a problem.
Eclipse somehow seems to default to java 1.4. Fixable, but annoying. And for some reason the “sound off” button in the nc2400 doesn’t really turns the sound off, just set it to really really low (even though the volume controller inside gnome also says that the sound is off).
Lots of small idiosyncrasies, but overall I’m quite happy with these systems.