NOTE:  Non-technically minded readers can pretty much skip this post.  It’s not going to mean much to you.

In an attempt to wipe away some of the funk of the week, I decided to do something truly fun and exciting… that’s right, I updated the operating system on my laptop from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Ubuntu Hardy Heron.  By “upgrade”, of course, I mean “wipe and reinstall” - I’d have to go from Feisty to Gutsy to get to Hardy Heron, and, well, Gutsy never worked well on my laptop.

Since it’s pretty much routine for anybody doing this to post some specs, well, let’s get to this:

Compaq Presario V6000Z
AMD Sempron 1.8 GHz on nVidia MCP51 chipset
40 GB Hard Drive (not sure of manufacturer)
1 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 6150 Go
Broadcom BCM94311MCG mini-PCI wireless adapter
nVidia MCP51 Ethernet adapter

First, the good news - unlike every other previous version of Ubuntu I’ve ever had to deal with on this laptop, Hardy Heron didn’t make me play games with boot options.  You have no idea how much that thrills me.  I threw in the LiveCD and it largely did what it was supposed to.  It didn’t handle the wireless adapter right, but that wasn’t surprising - Broadcom wireless chipsets have notoriously poor Linux support.  Best of all, it even got my screen resolution right on the first try.  That was also a first.  It would seem that Canonical has finally decided to stop ignoring HP laptop owners.

Installed Hardy Heron - went well.

I followed up the install by plugging in to my router and doing an update - there were over 100 updates.  No surprise there.  Like always, they were tons of little updates for all of the various packages that are installed in an Ubuntu installation.  If you’re used to dealing with OS X, it will blow your mind.  If you’re used to Windows, it will seem mildly strange - but only mildly.

Rebooted and installed the nVidia driver from the Restricted Driver Manager.  Worked great.  Another reboot.

Now, it was time to tackle wireless… here are the steps that worked for me:

1. Start with this walkthrough.
2. Once done with this walkthrough, the blue light still wasn’t on.  The key, as I discovered here, was to also pull the b44 and ssb modules.  You can do that by typing in sudo rmmod b43 b44 ssb after installing ndiswrapper but before starting ndiswrapper with sudo modprobe ndiswrapper.  Once I did that, the blue light came on instantly.

As an aside, the Dell package that the walkthrough has you download with the wget statement is 50 MB.  You can get the exact same driver (and just the wireless driver) here from HP.  However, to make that work, you won’t be able to use unzip to open it - instead, do the following:

1. sudo apt-get install cabextract
2. Download the file using Firefox - it’ll save on your desktop by default.
3. cd ~/Desktop
4. cabextract sp36884.exe

This will then dump all of the files out on your desktop - there’s not a lot of them, so they’re easy to clean up later.  Then, just run ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf from there.  The download is only 5 MB - much shorter.

So, now that I’ve started to play with it a little, here are some likes and dislikes:

Likes

- It’s prettier.  The new desktop effects are pretty neat.
- Power management!  Actual, honest-to-God power management!  When I unplug the power plug, the monitor dims.  When I plug it back in, the monitor goes bright.  Let the laptop sit for a bit with the power unplugged and *gasp* the monitor dims some more.  About damn time.

Dislikes

- Firefox 3 has an annoying habit that I wasn’t aware of until now.  When I type in a new blog post and hit “Enter”, instead of just going down a couple of lines like every other browser out there, it will bring the screen back to the top of the frame, then give me a couple of lines.  The end result is that, each time I hit “Enter”, I’m no longer able to see the bottom of the input box.  Supremely annoying.
- That’s pretty much it for now.  I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

All in all… it seems all right.  I’m impressed.

UPDATED: I discovered something rather unpleasant when I fired up my laptop this morning - the wireless was down.  Removing the b44 and ssb modules, then restarting ndiswrapper got it back up, but I decided I needed to come up with a more permanent solution.  Fortunately, the solution listed here did get the job done.  Use the 0.3 solution.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS