Recently I’ve bought a new laptop. One of the main search criteria were: no noise, matt display and of course no “microsoft tax”.
It was hard to find, but finally I came up with the model. Though I had to upgrade RAM just as I bought it - up to 2 gib, just to feel comfortable. The laptop shipped with FreeDOS, which I of course changed to Ubuntu Edgy 64 bit.
Edgy was hard to install. I don’t know why it was going this was, as my previous laptop had no problems with installation. But nx7400 just didn’t want Edgy, it seemed. It just hung all the time. I even started suspecting that something was wrong with the hardware.
I finally installed Edgy from the third attempt.
The first thing which upset me was the lack of hibernate and suspend to RAM. Well, actually they exist, but do not work properly. The laptop freezes and the only way to wake it is to turn it off completely.
The second annoyance (already fixed in Feisty) was the followign: when I unplugged/plugged the cable or changed screen brightness the laptop hung dead.
The solution was relatively easy to find in the ubuntu launchpad: bug 65027 you have to add the following word in the grub config /boot/grub/menu.ls
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/sda2 ro splash notsc nmi_watchdog=0and also add blacklist video into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
sudo echo "blacklist video" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklistAfter this “fix” my laptop stopped freezing :)
And yet another problem - Edgy does not recognize Broadcom WiFi adapter out of the box. They say that nx7400’s with built-in Intel wireless are more lucky - it has opensource drivers for that gadget.
April 19 the Ubuntu Feisty was released. And that same date I’ve downloaded the 32-bit version and installed it onto my laptop. Frankly speaking the installation was rather dull as compared to Edgy: everything (even the Broadcom adapter) was installed automatically.
The Edgy fix, which I have mentioned above, is not necessary anymore. Moreover when I tried to apply it the system does not boot, so I had to roll it back :) everything just works. Though suspend to RAM still does not work. Hope the next release of Ubuntu will fix that.
Overall feeling about Ubuntu Feisty is much better than those previous versions: I must admit that the installation utility did all the job for me. Just install it and start working.
PS. Oh, I forgot to mention that the first Ubuntu I’ve installed was 64 bit. I had a lot of little problems with that: firstly - many packages have not yet been ported to 64 bit and you have to use –force-architecture to install 32-bit apps, which does not always help. For example, Opera does not work (built-in Firefox is not my favorite browser). And yet quite a few hardware gadgets, like winmodem, have only close source 32-bit drivers. All in all I have decided to use 32-bit Feisty for the time being, until most problems are resolved.
First published on the old anydoby.com blog on 2007-04-24.