alan doyle

I’ve just finished installing Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) on my Acer 9303WSMi and first impressions are “WOW”, which is what Vista was meant to do but didn’t!

I have to agree with K.Mandla it’s so easy. Before I started I had a couple of requirements which I wanted Hardy to meet, mostly getting my hardware to work.

Hardware results :-

• nVidia Geforce Go 7300 – Works perfectly with ‘nv’ and ‘nvidia’ drivers. Full 3D and Compiz Fusion.
• Realtak HD AC97 Audio – Works perfectly.
• nVidia 10/100/1000 LAN – Works perfectly.
• Atheros AR5005g with WPA – Works perfectly.
• Acer Orbicam (Bison USB 2.0) – Works perfectly.
• Texas Instruments SD Card Reader – Works perfectly.
• Suspend and Resume – Works perfectly.

After installation I only needed to do 2 things in order to complete the installation.

1. Go to System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers to enable the full 3D driver for the nVidia card.
2. Go to Applications -> Add/Remove and Show “All available applications” and search for “Ubuntu restricted extras”. After installing this Flash, Java, MP3, DivX and WMV (amongst others) support was complete.

Compared to Vista this laptop is a speed-demon now. Everything is so responsive. Over the next few days I’ll be really hammering this laptop to see how well Hardy stands up. In the meantime I’ve added an entry for the Acer Aspire 9303WSMi on the Ubuntu Wiki to keep a record of what works and what needs testing.

Woohoo. Congrats to everyone at Canonical and the Ubuntu Development Teams. Ubuntu 8.04 is out. I’m currently downloading both the 64-bit desktop and 32-bit server disks so I can install them tonight. Happy days.

Update: I’ve successfully upgraded my server from 7.10 to 8.04. Hardy rocks. It was the most painless upgrade I’ve ever done. I’m loving Ubuntu more and more. Next up wipe Vista from my laptop and upgrade it to Ubuntu 8.04 too. I don’t think I’ll be needing Windows any more.

I have to say I’ve been looking forward to this for a while now. I’m absolutely sick of Windows Vista SP1 on my laptop (an Acer Aspire 9303) (Camaxtli). I’ve already ranted about Vista on many, many, many occasions and as of tomorrow I can kiss goodbye to Windows forever. I plan on running Ubuntu 8.04 as my primary OS from here on in. I’ve been playing with the Alphas, Betas and RC releases and all I can say is “I love it”. I’ll be posting a full howto on installing and running Ubuntu 8.04 on my Acer Aspire 9303 laptop soon.

On another similar note my home server (Nyx) recently died. Its 10 year old CPU (Pentium III 450 Slot 1) burnt out so I’ve comissioned my Toshiba Portege 4000 laptop (Pentium III 750) to run as my new home server (Njord). It’s currently running Ubuntu Server 7.10 from a 4Gb Compact Flash, and 44pin CFIDE adapter, brilliantly and, more importantly, silently. The only thing I needed to change was to specify a different network card to use ( from a Realtek 8139 to an Intel E100 ) and everything else in Ubuntu just worked, couldn’t do that with Windows without a BSOD – INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE or some such nonsense. I’ll be upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 Server tomorrow.

Funny thing is I was never “Anti-Microsoft” until they released Vista. I always said “If it works don’t knock it”. In fact I still run a Windows XP Media Center 2005 box under my TV beacuse it just works, maybe MythTV is better under Ubuntu 8.04 so I’ll give it another go. But for me Vista is broken. So before you all flame me I’ve never subscribed to the “Down with Microsoft, Up with Linux”. Each side has its own positive and negative points. I just try to keep a balance and for me that balance means ditching Vista in favour of Ubuntu in order to get the best out of my laptop and help me remain productive in 2008.

Well I’ve finally finished modifying the Wordpress template and launched the new Osmium Consortium website.

One down and two to go. Here goes to completing them before the year is out.