Ubuntu Installation

I’m probably the last person on Earth that does this… But I want to publish my installation of Ubuntu Herdy Heron.

In my last post I wrote about how I got the CD, and a bit of what happened with the installation. It was way faster and easier than lots of other installations I’ve done, the real problem came after it, when I had to configure my graphics and Wi-Fi cards.

Overlook

The installation was extremely neat. I was totally surprised.The first distro I installed in my life was Debian. The installation was in text mode, all done with the keyboard (obviously…) It took around two hours in an i486. I also installed Sylver in my Kurobox, it took around half an hour to transfer via FTP and around twenty minutes to uncompress. Apart from some details I had with the Kernel, it was easy because I had a wiki with every single comand I had to type. Lastly, around a year and a half ago I installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) in my old laptop. It was a little bit tough as I had to partition my disk for the first time. The installation took a lot, it took around an hour and a half. When it was finished, it booted without any problem, with the graphics card at max resolution and with everything else working. It was a pretty limited laptop, it didn’t had a Wi-Fi module, the graphics card was integrated as well as the sound card.

This time, the story was different. The installation was pretty fast, it didn’t even took half an hour. It finished fast, without a problem, even though I had read about people who had problems trying to get past the installer. When it booted, I had 800×600, no graphics acceleration, wireless signal, webcam or microphone.

So… here’s how I got them working

Drivers Installation

The installation of the drivers couldn’t have possible been more stupid and easy. I can’t bealieve I spent so much time trying to get them working. After the installation, the first thing I wanted to do was to install my graphics card, a Nvidia GForce 7000M. 800×600 looked pretty damn ugly to be accepted. I went through a thousand forums looking for information on how to configure my card with Ubuntu. I found some instructions in one of the posts for a similiar card, so I decided to give it a try. It failed miserably. After it I had 640×480, so I couldn’t possibly move around the desktop. I had to reinstall the whole the system, as my xorg.conf wasn’t willing to cooperate.

After my second installation, I decided to look a bit more carefully. I found in this blog another set of instructions to install it, using a program called Envy. They were so short and easy that I thought they wouldn’t worked, but again, I decided to give a try, hoping that my whole X-Server wouldn’t be blown out again.

I deactivated the restricted drivers, went on to Synaptic and installed envy-core and envy-gtk. I opened a Terminal and ran the program with root access, and chose the Nvidia driver option, in automatic mode. Ten minutes later, my display was running with full resolution, 1280×960. I loved Envy after that.

The next tought thing to do was the Wi-Fi card, an Atheros AR5007. As always there were no drivers available from the official page, so I searched for information on how to get it working with Windows drivers. I found two ways, one of them was using Mad Wi-Fi and the so-called NDIS Wrapper. I chose the NDIS Wrapper as its fairly easy to use, and I had heard of it before. Then, in this forum post I found the best instructions around to get it working. After miserably failing on trying to get the driver I use in Windows to work in Ubuntu, I downloaded an older driver and tried again with NDIS Wrapper. I wrote the script in the post to make it run at the start-up, and when I rebooted, I had full network speed. The only thing that’s missing is the WPA PSK encryption, but as soon as I get it working I’ll post it here.

Overall, it was an easy installation which really surprised me. I had to look into some pages, but I got it working with no problems at all. I can’t imagine doing the same when I started to use Ubuntu, things were way tougher in those days. This represents a good step for Ubuntu, as making it easier to configure will surely get more and more people migrating from their OS’s.