Let's try Ubuntu

I'd been playing around with Zenwalk for a little while. I really like it, but I'm having issues getting it configured to use the wireless card properly. After reinstalling it I can't even see the network card. So, I decided to give another distro a try. I've heard that Ubuntu is pretty good, so decided to give that a try. I happened to have a Live CD version and booted that. To my surprise, it came right up and I was surfing on my network. I still don't have any security working, but it's on-line.

Now to try loading it to the hard drive. The installer is a piece of cake. There's virtually nothing that the user has to know. But since I wanted to run in a dual boot configuration, that's not what I did. The installer didn't have anything for me to pick, so I chose to manually configure the partitions. I kept my FAT32 partition to allow sharing between Windows and Linux. I also told it about my NTFS partition, but I've since learned that I can't access this device from a regular account. My Swap partition was already defined, so I kept that, and I defined a big chunk of the disk for /home. There's still another 10 gig partition that I can load up another distro, and I think I'll probably be using Zenwalk on there, but I first will have to learn about GRUB.

After setting up the partition, I accepted the defaults thru the rest of the installer. It sort of rebooted and finished the install. During the rest of the install, I saw that I had an error that said:

4295021.489000J IPW2200: Firmware error detected

Obviously this is my wireless card. This was a little disheartening because the Live CD handled my wireless just fine. After booting up, I didn't have any wireless, so I had to reboot into XP to figure out where the firmware is kept. I booted again into Ubuntu to fix this problem. I had already downloaded the latest firmware and I untarred that into the /lib/hotplug/firmware directory using

tar xfzv ipw2200-fw-2.4.tgz

I rebooted and it recognized my wireless. But I still didn't have any Internet access. I did an iwconfig and found I was associated with fritznet but when I did an ifconfig, I didn't have an IP address. Obviously the card wasn't set up to use DHCP. So, I clicked on System >> Administration >> Networking, then selected my wireless card and the rest was simple. Everything is really easy to configure. I also found that I can set up a different location on this system. After getting this set up, I created a home location. I then connected to my router and configured it to use WEP. I copied the key from the browser and created a home-wep location. This location is set up using WEP, obviously. This way to doing this will allow me to use the plain home location when I'm travelling or in a public hot spot.

I also found that it recognizes the USB flash drive as soon as I put it in. That was a great buy. No need to worry about my files anymore.

I don't like how the other drives are named. I will need to change my /etc/fstab to pull the ntfs partition out. I changed /etc/fstab to name the FAT32 partition to /fat32. I haven't figured out how to put a shortcut to the directory on the desktop. I'll have to play around with that.

I found that the computer would not reboot, shutdown or hibernate. While I was playing around the Update Manager popped up and found all the updates that I needed. This upgraded my kernel to 2.6.10. I don't know if this fixed the shutdown problem or not because I also found a link where it described how to fix this problem. The other thing I did was this:

# sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then in the file, I changed the kernel line for the Kernel I was using from

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/hda5 ro noapic nolapic quiet splash

to

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/hda5 ro quiet splash

There's really not that much more that I need to configure. If Linux goes this way, it will become mainstream. This is so easy to configure.

I really like that it automatically puts the battery monitor on the top bar. I do need to learn how to use Gnome, though. I don't know where the various config items are located. It's not hard to find it, but I do want to know where they are. It's really cool to do this. I also think that my display is showing correctly.

I'm sure I'll find stuff that I don't like, but not yet. So far it's really good. One thing I do need to do is configure my system to hide my real MAC address. I found an article that walked through setting this up on a Slackware system, but I don't know about Ubuntu.