My adventuring into the vast and wonderful realm of open source software and Linux continued this week with the Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn release. So, I’m not sure if I mentioned this before but I’m using Ubuntu on a Compaq Presario v6000 that I bought back in January. So, it’s kind of a new laptop, which is bound to cause some issues. Has it ever.
So, I come home from work on Thursday night and I boot my laptop and slip into Ubuntu, even though I’d been downloading an install disk all day, Rob informed me that you could just download an update through the Update Manager. So, I gave that a shot. It took all night (partly because the net was being slow and partly because my screensaver was acting up and causing my computer to reboot whenever it came on). So, finally, Friday morning everything is updated and all I have to do is restart to have my very own copy of Feisty. So, I restart, and the computer tells me that there is an error in the XServer and it can’t load the UI. “Wha?” says I shaking my head with the accompanying shocked head shaking noise from cartoons. So, with my laptop next to me I sat at my desktop computer and went out in search of why the hell this thing wasn’t working. Turns out, the way to get the UI to start working was to change a setting on the xorg.conf file, change the configuration of xserver, from using the nvidia driver (which is the type of graphics card I have) to using something called “vesa.” I did that and yay! The UI loaded, but it looked kind of cruddy. So, I started poking around the Synaptic Package Manager and saw that though the nvidia-new driver was loaded (as it should have been) the nvidia-new kernel wasn’t loaded. I stroked my beard, nodded my head and installed the kernel, then went into the config file for xserver and changed it back from vesa to nvidia. I rebooted, and crossed my fingers. It worked, now my display is all shiny and wonderful.
Still, that was not my only issue with Feisty. No, you see, no matter what I do, whether it’s get a new computer, move and set up my computer at a new home, or install a new OS, I always have one issue, connecting to the internet. Without fail, I will have issues connecting to the internet. I appear to be cursed. See, Ubuntu doesn’t currently work with the built in wireless card for my laptop (it’s a Broadcom Dell 1390 mini-PCI card wireless adapter … or some similar combination of those words). I tried for almost 3 solid days when I first installed Edgy to get the damn wireless card to work. Finally, I gave up on the internal wireless card and started fiddling with a Linksys WUSB54GC wireless adapter I happened to have lying around. I got that to work after several hours of poking around and then ordering a DLink DWL-122 off of EBay. So, for over a month now, I’d been using this Linksys adapter and just had the little DLink one sitting in it’s box off to the side. Yesterday, after having gotten the UI to work I had to try and get my damn internet to work, because not only does Feisty still not really deal with my internal wireless adapter, for some reason the Linksys one wasn’t really working. So, I tried to focus on getting the Linksys adapter to work, for about an hour or so I poked around the net looking for the instructions I’d used to make it work before. I couldn’t find them, so I grabbed the DLink and poked and prodded and finally tried one simple command in the terminal I was sure wouldn’t work, and it did, and now I have wireless access with the laptop again. So, as I explained to my delightful girlfriend, who politely held her tongue when I mentioned I got the Linksys adapter to work but the DLink adapter was already on the way, it wasn’t entirely a waste of money to get that DLink adapter. In fact, the DLink seems to be running faster than the Linksys did, which is pretty cool.
So, now I have Feisty up and running on the laptop, and I have to say that it is a definite improvement over Edgy, it seems to work a lot better. With Edgy I had issues with the laptop freezing and having to reboot. Feisty hasn’t had that problem yet. Anyway, I also installed Beryl, and there were some issues, but overall that is pretty damn cool. I’ll post more on my adventures with Beryl later.
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