[Cialug] New laptop success

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Dec 20, 2007 4:59 PM, Tim Wilson <tim_linux at wilson-home.com> wrote:

> I mentioned to a couple people last night that I was having problems
> getting my new laptop to boot KUbuntu 7.10.  I discovered that if I take
> out the "quiet" and "splash" boot options, and add "vga=771" (after the
> "--"), it boots off the DVD.  So at least there is partial success.  For the
> record, it is an HP dv9408nr laptop.  Supposedly, there are XP driver issues
> with some of the newer (read: loaded with Vista) HP Laptops.  If I get it to
> install, this could be another example where Linux surpasses XP for hardware
> support.  The next trick is I want to install KUbuntu to my external USB
> hard drive (at least until I figure out how to get the drive repartitioned,
> and get Vista to be happy with it).  Ken, didn't you have issues getting
> Vista and Ubuntu to play well together?
>


My brother has a similar model notebook. It has the newer intel/realtek HD
audio chipset. If yours is the same you'll have problems with the sound even
in 7.10. To fix this, install the following package:

linux-backports-modules

then from a terminal run the program alsamixer and make sure the outputs are
not muted. I'm not sure if your computer is the one that has the shiny
little finger slider thing for the volume control... if so, it works fine,
though the LEDs may not necessarily work the same way they do in Vista. The
next release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu will have alsa 1.0.15 which has better
support for this newer chipset. If you experience the problem where the
sound works fine for 15 min then progressively gets louder over the course
of about 2 min until year ears start bleeding, just ignore it, it's your
imagination.

We didn't have any trouble getting vista and Ubuntu to dual boot. As a
matter of fact, his computer out of the box had a funny issue with the hard
drive capacity showing wrong and disk i/o being funky... something to do
with the partition table. After we installed Ubuntu, Vista actually
recognized the proper disk capacity and worked better! I'm not 100% sure but
we may have actually downloaded the gparted cd and used it to create the
disk partitions, since its version of gparted doesn't hide the info/warning
messages. (I may be confusing his case with another computer, but if
(K)Ubuntu gives you a really general "there may be a problem, are you sure
you want to continue" dialog, say no and use the gparted disk)

On my computer, I use Linux 95+% of the time and Vista hardly ever.
Therefore I split my 120G hard drive so that 25G went to Vista and the rest
to Ubuntu. (25 for / and the rest for /home) Then I used the ext IFS driver
for Windows and mounted the ext2/3 drive in Vista so that I can see my
linux home directory as a drive in Windows. It works perfectly. You can use
it just like a FAT32 or NTFS drive, so I keep all my files on the linux
drive so I can get to them wherever I'm at. http://www.fs-driver.org/

If you're a kubuntu fan, you may want to consider going straight to Hardy,
Kubuntu 8.04. The alpha 2 release may be out tomorrow (Friday) and if not,
soon. The benefit of 8.04 is that it will have KDE4. I'll warn you, KDE4
still is a little rough (which is why the release is alpha), but supposedly
its going to be quite an improvement, and from my first impression, it's
pretty sharp. I typically upgrade around the alpha2 release and its usable
and its fun to see it take shape. (I don't use kubuntu full time but I have
kde installed for testing purposes)

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode
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