LincolnBlogs

Preamble:

I know there hasn’t been a lot of technical content on here lately. This is in stark contrast to that recent trend.

I just purchased a Compaq Presario F730US laptop, ideally for my wife’s Christmas present. This wasn’t really even the laptop I wanted, but it was what was available at the time. My wife has long been using an old 400mhz laptop to plod around the web on for about 7 months now and I wanted to do something nice for her and get her something a bit more beefy that could easily handle things like youtube videos and the other things that my wife surfs around the web for. So how did I end up with it? Well, I found out that AMD64 arch is not quite as polished as the i386 port, so the new lappy sits on my desk and my slightly older i386 model gets to play all day with my wife 🙂

And now for the good stuff:

This laptop is an AMD64 X2 @ 1.8ghz with 1gb ram and 120gb hdd. Add to that that it is a very good looking laptop. None of that had anything to do with my purchase of that, though. It was based on proce alone, and at $440, it was a pretty decent deal.

I decided to install Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon on this thing because, hey, I can’t be seen running windows right? I put the cd in the drive and booted up several times trying to get the installer running with no luck whatsoever, UNTIL, I looked down at the sticker and it reminded me that the machine was not, in fact, i386, but it was AMD64. So, I downloaded the correct version for the architecture and tried that instead 🙂

With the correct install cd running, the only problem I had was I needed to add a “noapic” to the end of the boot parameters. At that point, it booted right into the live/install cd and I was able to do the install without any issues. I should note here that in general, Ubuntu installs are relatively painless and have been that way for quite some time. The one caveat there is that if you, like me, use mac address filtering on your router, you must add the mac address in *both times*, once for each interface. 🙂

After the install, I selected the proprietary nvidia drivers to get my X working right (better). Sound worked right off the bat. Really, the only thing left was to get the wifi running. The problem with that is the wireless has the broadcomm chipset, which, historically, does not get along well with Linux. Well, in this case, I was pleased to be wrong. I found a website:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff#head-818e0ccb34dc3e6733f798494fb6ce95ea5548c6
which describes how to easily get the wireless going (use step 2a by the way).

At that point, I basically had a working Ubuntu install on the new lappy. It was only then that I found out that AMD64 package support is not quite as mature as i386. That’s where I am now, but at least I have a working system so far. More later.