Victor Solanoy

I’ve been running Ubuntu 9.04 on an IBM ThinkCentre M51 I picked up from MicroCenter for $150 for a little over 2 weeks now.

Almost flawless… I have a Belkin wireless card installed in the box, which as the Atheros chipset, which results in a lost wirelss connection after a few hours of use.

Ubuntu 9.04 identified the card, lauched a restricted driver dialogue. After downloading and activating the MadWiFi driver, everything’s running smoothly. It’s been over a week now and the system hasn’t lost its WiFi connection.

So, my attempt to get the E360 on Linux, while successful, was an exercise that didn’t result in much. Suse wouldn’t install, Ubuntu wouldn’t boot and gOS wouldn’t boot either (maybe because it’s a Ubuntu derivative?).

I installed Puppy Linux and everything worked. The system just didn’t have enough horsepower to allow Pandora, so that pretty much killed that project.

Attempted installing Ubuntu 8.10 and Redhat on an old Fujitsu E360 with no luck.

I’m going to try Suse 11.1, OpenGeu and gos 3.1 next. I just want to run it to stream Pandora in the baby’s room, and occasionally look stuff up. I’m essentially trying to build a machine that will be used to run “cloud” applications with no intent of actually storing anything on it.

I found that I’ve been able to do pretty much everything with Ubuntu with no withdrawals from either Mac or PC applications. I really think that cloud based applications will spell doom to the concept of the operating system in the coming years, particularly as people lean to adapt to web-based services that provide functionality that no longer requires a core operating system.

I finally got Ubuntu 8.10 running properly on my HP G60. My previous attempt was successful if it weren’t for the fact that Ubuntu didn’t like the nVidia graphics chipset. The system basicall ran un-accelerated, meaning it was a dog when it came to GUI updates.

After Googling for a fix, I found someon’s blog that had the simplest solution to this.

Open a terminal window and execute the following, then restart:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-177

Once restarted, enable the NVidia driver (177)… and all will be happy in Ubuntu land.

Let me know if this helps!

Searching high and low, I tried everything to stop by system from producing an annoying system beep from Linux running in VMWare Player.

It was simple:

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

For a more permanent solution, add blacklist pcspkr to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

See the Ubuntu tutorials for details.