58 New Laptop, putting Ubuntu on the eMachines D620-5133 << Prev Next >>
by: ColonelZen	IP: 23.21	rated: 0-0	posted: 2009-01-16 07:06:33
Well, I finally got a laptop. I was going to buy myself one last year, but just before doing so my job came through with a better faster one than they had issued me before, so I put it off. But a few weeks ago I changed jobs and my new employer is a bit less generous in the perks, especially those that cost them money (pretty good on the others though, and benefits).     Anyway, the purchase itself was a minor adventure in aggravation. My wife wanted a gift for our daughter from Circuit City, and I wandered over to the laptops. I saw two that were ideal. They had this eMachine D620 for 450 and an HP G60-230 *advertised* at 500. Well, I wanted the HP initially, but Circuit City is notorious for "bait and switch" and that was exactly what the HP was. Though they had the demo in the store, the tag said "sold out". No problem, I went home and looked online, figuring to order it or pick it up at another CC. It turns out that you could not order it online; and through there store finder for it ALL zips and all stores said "Not in stock". I wrote a few nastygrams, including comment on their site for the product - which, surprise - was quickly deleted. And the next day - the next day! - the price was upped to 630 and it was available to order online.     So Circuit City are scum with a bait and switch history. Almost this exact chain of events happened to me a few months back when I was helping my sister-in-law buy a laptop for her son. So it really wasn't a surprise that they advertise something cheaper than it can be found anywhere else, but will refuse to actually sell it to you.     Yeah, so I'm a sucker for buying the eM from these scum. Not really, it's a good price - there was one other place online (tiger-direct?) offering it for ten dollars less, but I'd have had to pay shipping and probably make a trip to pick it up at the shipper's depot. They can't be making much profit on it in any case. So I bought it. Write it off to being a prisoner of consumer culture with the note that this blog will probably wind up costing them more than the profit in the long run anyway. Buy it elsewhere if you can.     Anyway, it came with Vista Home Basic. I ran it just long enough to take an eyeball at it, my first experience with Vista. What a dog. It was sllllooowww - and this laptop specs out higher than any computer I currently own.     No problem, I planned to put Linux on it in any case, and that both the eM and HP had reports of successful Linux installations, which was the tipping point of my buy decision.     I burned Ubuntu 8.10 in both the AMD64 and the i386-32 bit versions, just in case. I tried the AMD 64 and it's running on it now.     Installation was only minorly aggravating, mostly because of some quirks with my home network. The install of the operating system went without quirks or problems. I had to run a little program from within Vista which allowed it to install from the CD. This was on the disk and did it's job without issue, but the instructions could be clearer. After running the installer, (I surmise it installed an alternate boot loader) I had to shut vista down and reboot. It offered me the choice of windows or Ubuntu, and I naturally chose Ubuntu. This comes up in "trial" mode, where it doesn't actually write anything permanent to the disk. But the "install" icon is right there on the desktop and after looking around a bit, I clicked it.     In partitioning, it asked if I wanted to leave a partition for the installed windows. No.     It then asked for a user id to start automatically (optionally) and some timezone information and away it went. It took about half an hour.     After the completed installation it tells you to take out the CD and goes for a reboot. Up came Ubunto native on the laptop! One obvious problem was that the display was "twitchy" and ugly. Well, almost immediately, it popped up a note about proprietary hardware drivers for Nvidia and Broadcom. Well I tried both. The Nvidia driver would not click to "active" and the Broadcom would not install at all. The driver install for the video appeared to have completed, but the wireless driver seemed to fail because it was trying to connect to the network - which I hadn't set up yet. Well, I rebooted again, and the video was crisp, clear and stable. The video driver was working.     Well I piddled with the settings but could not get the wireless working. I plugged in the ethernet to my router ... it connected. I did the driver for Broadcomm again. It completed. I still had some problems getting wireless working, but I have an off brand wireless router and had it set for non-broadcast. I turned it to broadcast on and then (after unplugging the ethernet) I could see my router in the list. I had to fiddle with the security settings and password a bit, but after a couple minutes it connected fine.     At some point I tried the hibernate and suspend modes. Bad news. it wouldn't even boot until I disconnected the power cord and replugged it. I'm not overly concerned about this, as shutdown takes about 10 seconds and it reboots in less than a minute. I later ran the updater task which updated about 218 packages. I haven't tried hibernate or suspend since then. But tonight, the second day with the laptop, it booted fine.     I have a lot of software I'll be putting on it. Sound asked for some proprietary drivers to load the codecs, but this is mostly automated with "wizards" which simply ask if you want to use those proprietary drivers. They sometimes ask for your password to confirm running those things it must do as root, but this is mostly painless and simple. I have lots more to do to get it set up just the way I want - I'm a programmer after all, and there are about a zillion programming packages and tools I'll be loading, but at this point I see nothing that can present an insuperable problem.     I'm extremely satisfied with both the laptop and Ubuntu.     Did I mention that this turkey flys. The hour or so I spent in Vista was instructive just as a comparison in performance. (I should note that I turned off visual effects in the graphics; eye-candy is bad for you ... or at least I don't need it).     -- TWZ