The recent release of the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron beta prompted me to investigate, and run the dist-upgrade. The Gutsy Gibbon beta release and subsequent upgrades was a relatively painless process, and Ubuntu gets better with every release.

Two things that did concern me, as they seem to impact every time I upgrade, were the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, and the Broadcom wireless. Luckily, the upgrade took care of the NVIDIA drivers fine (although I haven’t tested out World of Warcraft yet), but as expected the wireless totally failed to work.

A little investigation threw up instructions (also enumerated on other sites) on how to use fw-cutter to install new drivers.

In the interest of documentation, here’s the process I used to re-enable wireless on my Compaq Presario F500 laptop:

Starting in my /home/ directory, I created a Drivers/wireless directory - I always hang on to old drivers just in case.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
mkdir Drivers/wireless
cd Drivers/wireless/
wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-011
make
cd ..
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" wl_apsta.o

A quick reboot, all was well!

I’m still investigating all the new things in Hardy Heron - so far Firefox 3 is the only thing I’ve really used, and I’m not entirely convinced yet…

Update
Seems that the B43 driver isn’t the best yet, and a rollback to ndiswrapper was in order.

One of the default screensavers included with Ubuntu 7.10 is one that will display whatever pictures you have saved in your ‘Pictures’ folder (/home/<username>/Pictures). The screensaver will randomly display a picture from this and any subfolders.

However, there’s no way of customsing which folder the screensaver reads if you want to use your Pictures folder to store pictures, but manage which of these images is used.

A workaround is as follows:

• Create a new folder somewhere (it doesn’t have to be under the ‘Pictures’ folder)
• Open a terminal window (select Terminal under Accessories)
• enter the following:

  gksu gedit /usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop

  (enter your password if prompted)

• Scroll down to the line (near the end) that begins

  Exec=slideshow

• Add the following after this command:

  --location=<your pictures path>

  (You will have to use standard escape sequences if you have spaces in the path.)

• Here’s an example:

  Exec=slideshow --location=/home/myusername/Pictures/My\ Screensaver

And that’s it. Save the file, and restart your screensaver. It will now only search for pictures in your chosen folder.

After fiddling about all last night trying to get the laptop to boot, I gave up around 1am and went and played some World of Warcraft. Then just before bed I checked the Ubuntu forums again. A bit of searching for my laptop name and model led me to a thread with some helpful hint, including the suggestion to add

noapic

to the end of the boot command.

This solved all my problems, and let me resolve the issue I had with having to re-compile the NVIDIA driver every time, let me install the restricted drivers and the necessary bits to get the laptop working properly.

There comes a time when the 20Gb partition you set aside on a dual-boot system to run Ubuntu just isn’t big enough, so the idea of upgrading to a spanky new hard drive with a little more room becomes very attractive.

This is a path I started down this afternoon on my Compaq Presario F500, which has proven to not be painless, even with the strides Gutsy has taken in hardware compatibility. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

To do the upgrade, I went out and bought a nice new 120Gb SATA drive, and downloaded a copy of the Gutsy desktop ISO. After installing the new HDD, I rebooted with the Live CD, which promptly failed to load GDM, with the old ‘freeze when switching graphic modes’ bug from Feisty (and Debian 4). Unfortunately, no amount of fiddling about with boot time settings (including the work-around for Feisty, adding ‘vga=792′ to the end of the boot command) resolved this issue.

I managed to boot the Gutsy live CD in safe mode, and also managed to install Gutsy on the new hard drive. However, I still could not boot into GNOME. I rewrote the xorg.conf to match a known, working one (the one posted elsewhere here), and it still wouldn’t boot, insisting on freezing when switching modes, or inly running in low graphics mode. When I did finally manage to get GDM running, networking wasn’t working at all, and I kept getting a strange bug that I eventually tracked down to being something to do with DBUS.

So I took the easy way out and started again, using an Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop CD I had lying around. I used this quite by accident, but it’s proven to be a good thing, as I also had a 7.04 Alternate CD lying around, so once 6.10 was installed, I could do a straight package upgrade from the 7.04 Alternate CD.

This left me with a (mostly!) working system that I’m still twiddling with, although as you can see from this post I am connected to the Internet again. The bcm43xx drivers still blow goats, so I followed a guide on the Ubuntu forums to download and install ndiswrapper and the wireless drivers from Dell (even though I have a Compaq, the wireless chip reports itself as a Dell chip…). Following the instructions step by step, rebooting where indicated, and everythign was up and running and I am now, once more, wireless on the Compaq.

However I still have a major issue with the graphics settings. This laptop has a NVIDIA chip in it, so one of the first things to do is download the latest NVIDIA drivers, and install them. The only problem I have at the moment is that I have to re-compile them every time I want to run X… For some reason, I can compile the drivers, boot into GDM and work properly, but when I reboot, I have to recompile the same driver, overwriting it with the same version. More investigation is needed.

Now, however it’s time to remove this brand new hard drive and put the old one back in. It wasn’t until I went rummaging that I realised my USB harddrive adaptor only wotks with PATA hard drives, not SATA. So to get sll my settings and configuration files from the old hard drive means re-installing it and copying everything to a DVD. Wish me luck!

I saw on the Ubuntu forums a comment about getting the NVIDIA drivers working with the Compaq Presario F500, so I thought it might be wortwhile posting my entire xorg.conf - since I know it works :) This configuration also supports compiz fusion, albeit slowly but you can, if you want, have the cube, wobbly windows and all the other bits and pieces. Add some extra RAM if you’re going to do this though :)

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen         "Default Screen" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard"
    InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
    InputDevice    "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice    "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice    "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice    "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

Section "Files"
    FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
    FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic"
    FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
    FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
    FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
    FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
    FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
    FontPath        "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load           "i2c"
    Load           "bitmap"
    Load           "ddc"
    Load           "extmod"
    Load           "freetype"
    Load           "glx"
    Load           "int10"
    Load           "vbe"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "CoreKeyboard"
    Option         "XkbRules" "xorg"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "gb"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Configured Mouse"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "CorePointer"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option         "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
    Option         "Buttons" "7"
    Option         "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Synaptics Touchpad"
    Driver         "synaptics"
    Option         "SendCoreEvents" "true"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto-dev"
    Option         "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "stylus"
    Driver         "wacom"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
    Option         "Type" "stylus"
    Option         "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "eraser"
    Driver         "wacom"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
    Option         "Type" "eraser"
    Option         "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "cursor"
    Driver         "wacom"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
    Option         "Type" "cursor"
    Option         "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Generic Monitor"
    HorizSync       28.0 - 64.0
    VertRefresh     43.0 - 60.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI-X GeForce Go 6100"
    Driver         "nvidia"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Default Screen"
    Device         "nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI-X GeForce Go 6100"
    Monitor        "Generic Monitor"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "AddARGBVisuals" "True"
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
    Option         "NoLogo" "True"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       1
        Modes      "1280x800"
    EndSubSection
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       4
        Modes      "1280x800"
    EndSubSection
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       8
        Modes      "1280x800"
    EndSubSection
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       15
        Modes      "1280x800"
    EndSubSection
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       16
        Modes      "1280x800"
    EndSubSection
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes      "1280x800"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Time flies when you’re having fun, and I’ve certainly been having fun with Ubuntu recently. Looking back through my (not very frequent) posts, I see it’s been about 6 weeks 6 months! since I posted about installing Ubuntu as a test on my new laptop.

Since then, I can, quite literally, count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve booted back into Windows Vista. At the moment the Vista partition (all 20Gb of it!) serves to provide me with printing capabilities (My printer is an old Dell USB one that only barely works under Vista), and to update my iPod with some purchased music (Teeny Shiny and Bambi’s Dilemma by Melt Banana)

I have no reason or need to run Windows Vista on my laptop, and has been proven over the past four months, there is no reason I need to run Windows for work either. It’s turning out that the only reason I actually have a Windows desktop at all is to act as my games machine, since this is the one area that Linux is deficient. Whilst I know that a lot of games can run quite happily under WINE or through Cedega’s service, not all do. So for now, I have one Windows machine running XP (which will never have Vista installed on it), and one laptop running Ubuntu.

Going back to the work comment, for the past 4 months I’ve been working for as Head of Web Development for Hachette Filipacchi, the publisher of Elle Magazine, Red Magazine and Ideal Home amongst others. During that entire period I’ve been running a dual monitor desktop running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (well, until recently when I did a dist-upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon). The only time I’ve had some trouble is with project management software, which I rarely need anyway. There was nothing I needed that was Windows only. As a quick rundown, here’s the most common software in use in the office, and what I replaced it with.

Microsoft Exchange
Replaced with Evolution (through a webmail connection). Whilst it’s possible to connect to an Exchange server through IMAP, the IT department weren’t comfortable with that.

Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Visio
Replaced with Open Office, and no-one noticed. I now use Open Office exclusively.

Tortiose SVN+PSPad
Replaced with Eclipse+Subclipse+PHPEclipse. I’m finding the move to an IDE to have been beneficial, rather than just using a text editor. Combining Eclipse with a local copy of Apache+PHP+MySQL means I can do all my web development on my local machine, and use Subversion to store the code, and later publish to the live webserver in a managed way. Very handy.

MSN Messenger
Replaced with Pidgin, although there was also the option of Meebo, and to deal with some firewall issues I also wrote my own web-based chat app.

Photoshop
Replaced with The Gimp. This is perhaps the most contentious issue for some people, since whilst The Gimp isa good piece of software, it is certainly not in the same league as Photoshop when it comes to image manipulation. That said, since I’m not a designer and only use The Gimp to resize images, and perhaps create some spot graphics, it’s not an issue for me.

Winamp
Replaced with Amarok.

Filezilla
Replaced with… Filezilla. Yep, there’s a native port of Filezilla available for Linux, and recent releases have made it as stable as the Windows version of the software.

The Bat
Replaced with Firebird. I think Firebird still a little ways to go to be as useful as The Bat, but I find it quite suitable as a mail client.

That pretty much covers everythign I need on a day to day basis. Having direct access to a command shell also helps tremendously when developing websites, and I can connect to the webserver very quickly. Running Ubuntu also makes it extremely easy to install and maintain a local web development environment, so I actually do all my development directly on my desktop under Apache 2, PHP5 and MySQL5. Once I’ve done my coding, I can simply commit to my SVN repository and then check out the code directly to the live webserver. Makes developing complex websites very easy!

One perhaps under mentioned aspect of running Ubuntu (or many other Linux distributions for that matter) that I have found remakably useful - and something I actively miss when using a Windows machine - is multiple workspaces. For example, on my laptop I have four workspaces arranged in a 2×2 grid, and I can place windows within a particular workspace to organise them into logical work groups.

On my work machine, whilst I had two monitors, I retained the four workspaces (although I also ran Compiz Fusion, so I had the 3D cube rather than a 2×2 grid), again allowing me to group windows together into logical workspaces. So I would have one workspace for email clients, one for research, one for development (Eclipse, local web browser, editors etc) and so on.

The new version of Ubuntu is due for release tomorrow, and having been using it for the past few weeks, I think this is the next major step forward for Linux - it does just work.

As a last note, a lot of people I have spoken to claim that it’s almost impossible to get support for Linux, which is why they don’t use it. I did some checking, and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, provides commercial support for Ubuntu via email and telephone - and you can buy support for an entire YEAR for £150…

There’s been a lot of talk in the past day or so about Dell finally listing a desktop computer system for sale without Windows XP or Windows Vista, shipping with the option of Ubuntu instead. The pricepoints are interesting as well, with the Ubuntu-installed machines coming in at a lower price than their Windows installed equivalents.

Given that the Dimension E520 desktop starts at around £249, I figured I’d see what the Ubuntu price was - but it seems that the much-vaunted “Dell Sells Ubuntu-based Desktops” only applies in the US, as there’s no mention anywhere on the European Dell website of any models that feature Ubuntu as a choice of OS.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Dell, US Only

Well, it’s all configured and working now, with a little fiddling, a lot of reading and the kind help of the Ubuntu community. Here’s what I had to do to make my Compaq laptop work, both with video and with wireless networking.

Video
The first sticking point. To make this work, you need to add the directive

vga=792

to the end of the boot command. When you first boot the live CD, press F6 and add that command at the end of the line. This will let you boot into the graphical shell.

You will need to do this later to the grub bootloader menu in /boot/grub/menu.lst - simply add the directive to the end of the kernel boot command. That’s it, it all worked from there. Some minor issues with the NVIDIA drivers, desktop effects and Beryl, so I’m using none of those. I’m going to try the newly released NVIDIA drivers over the weekend.

Wireless
The second sticking point, and something that was giving me nightmares for ages. I got wireless working on the Broadcom 4311 that’s built in to the point where it would see other people’s access points, but not mine.

In the end, it was a post by Pichulines on the Ubuntu forums that solved my problem. He suggested following the Broadcom BCM4311 rev 01 (ndiswrapper) installation guide. So, I followed this very carefully, except that I used the latest 1.43 ndiswrapper instead of the 1.35 version documented in the guide.

After the reboot stage, everything worked perfectly. I could see and connect to my wireless access point using WPA and I could roam wirelessly.

Moving Along
Now all that’s left to do is to finish fiddling with the setup. I need to look at various things like reconfiguring the window manager (I’m using the default Gnome, but I may switch to KDE or Enlightenment), and I need to get little things in place like proper Beryl support (I love the multiple desktops on a cube - incredibly useful when you don’t have multiple monitors), and I would really like a Mac-like toolbar, something I got used to on my work PC, although it’s not critical.

Hopefully this will help those who have been having the same problems.

I thought I’d try something different and install Debain, but I ran into the same problems as Ubuntu with the machine freezing. I did some digging and found a fix of sorts, so now I can boot into Debian quite happily (an environment I am using right now!)

The problem seems to be generic, so I’ll try installing Ubuntu tomorrow with this fix and see what happens…

I really wanted to run Ubuntu on this new laptop of mine. It’s a Compaq Presario F500, but for some reason Ubuntu jsut will not run properly, even from the live CD. There seems to be some issue with the graphics card, as what is consistent is that if I boot into anything other than Safe Graphics mode (and then, only sometimes), once the OS starts up the video drivers the entire machine freezes solid.

The Laptop runs an NVIDIA 6100 GeForce Go video card, which seems to be the problem. I also know the CD I used is fine, as I’ve already used it to install Ubuntu in a partition on my Sony laptop (whcih runs an ATI card).

Having played around with Ubuntu under various hardware configurations and having run into problems running 3 monitors, I’me rather familiar now with the xorg.conf file - and the drivers were set to vesa, which are pretty much guaranteed to work. NVIDIA cards do require restricted mode drivers, so it’s a bit hard to update and install them when you have no connection to the net and no shell to work in!

I even tried to alternate CD, which worked fine right up to the point where it tried to install a kernel - then it entirely failed to find any one of the three on the CD. The installer directed me to check one of the virtual screens, and when I did I saw the error, and then the laptop froze solid.

So all in all not a great experience installing Ubuntu so far, which is a real shame as I really wanted this laptop to be my first all-Linux machine. I may have to wipe out my old Vaio and install Ubuntu on that instead. I have managed to get Vista running in a way I’m happy with though - UAC’s turned off, I have a decent AV program and a decent firewall, and some custom-written rules means the OS can’t actually communicate across the internet, Rocket Dock means I have a toolbar launcher, and Yod’m 3D gives me a Beryl-like 4 desktop cube rotator, which is incredibly handy.

Oh, and World of Warcraft actually runs quite well, so that’s gaming sorted too.