I just finished downloading Feisty, and before I install it I guess I need to bitch about how hard it is to get all features working under Linux.
First of all, the graphics card (Geforce Go 6150 UMA) only works in 16-bit colour with no Direct Rendering with the open-source drivers, and obtaining drivers with no net connection (as I will explain, the wireless does not work) under Linux is quite difficult
Next, the integrated nVidia sound adapter is a bit useless, it kind of works most of the time, but the microphone,
headphone socket and wine do not work at all.
Now, the worst problem, the wireless adapter (Broadcom 4311) does not work natively under Linux. However, ndiswrapper does not work either, as there is some sort of IRQ conflict between the ndiswrapper-ed drivers and the nVidia proprietary binary drivers.
Finally, my GRUB spontaneously somehow ended up pointing to the wrong partitions on my hard disk and no manual,
editing of the config files would get it working again.
I sincerely hope that most, if not all these issues are resolved in Feisty. I’ll install it when I have time this week.
And the line breaks in this are also borked
#1 by Matt Hartley on 22 April, 2007 - 8:56 AM
Hi, I feel your pain, I believe that Edgy is way more stable than Feisty in some areas. But let’s start pounding out these problems one by one.
1) Video – Just be thankful you are using Nivida. Goto
http://www.albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html
Use the stable installer and install this:
http://albertomilone.com/ubuntu/nvidia/scripts/envy_0.9.2-0ubuntu2_all.deb
Then reboot, look under Applications, System Tools, Envy, Follow the installer for Nvidia. Never tried this with nvidia on a notebook, but these are non-free drivers and might work alright. Should you wish to access the control panel for the driver (like nvidia in windows), do not try to use it any other way than:
Applications, Accessories, Terminal
then type:
sudo nvidia-settings
Doing this will ensure that you can make changes that “stick”.
2) Is there a volume icon next to the clock? If so, double click it rather than single clicking it, you should see something like the following:
Master, Headphone, PCM, Line In, CD, Microphone, PC Speaker
Make sure everything is turned on. Chances are, they are not all on.
3) Broadcom and Linux go together like Linux and ATI – it’s just not a good match thanks to sloppy efforts from the broadcom team. Consider this route:
Froogle @ TEW-501PC (Worked flawlessly out of the box in Edgy, but with Feisty, you will likely want to uninstall that silly gnome-network-manager if it proves not to work. System, Administration, Synaptic Package Manager, search network-manager, right click for removal and apply at the top.
I run bareback myself with:
System, Administration, Networking, my password and then activate the card. Should it prove a little “off” after removing network-manager, un-check and recheck the wireless card radio box again. Give it a sec, then it will begin to set things up. WPA is not happening very easily however, without “NM”, so hopefully that will work and you will not have to remove it.
4) I never dual-boot, especially with Vista ever-changing happenings. If you must, use Acronis Disk Director found here:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/multibooting.html
It is completely fool-proof to goof the MBR with this.
5) cannot help you with the line breaks.
#2 by Aaron on 23 April, 2007 - 10:28 AM
Thanks!
After some googling I found out that:
The headphone socket not working is actually a bug/not-yet-enabled feature for my sound card in edgy:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=322632
nVidia graphics and the Broadcom 4311 wireless CAN be made to work, just not at the same time:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=48327&page=2