Fixing up Three Ferrari Ubuntu Problems

Currently I have a triple boot on the 64-bit AMD Ferrari 3400 machine.

Over the weekend, I worked on fixing up some of the little annoying remaining problems on the Ubuntu system on my Ferrari laptop, that would prevent it feeling as comfortable as I've become with the Solaris system there.

• Getting Wireless working:
  Again, I followed the How To described in more detail here, but with one difference. I used the firmware from my Windows system located at:

        /Windows/System32/Drivers/bcmwl5.sys
        

  That Windows partition was nicely mounted by Nautilus on my Windows system. I just copied it over and unpacked it with:

        % sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware ~/Desktop/bcmwl5.sys
        

• Screen Resolution of 1280x1024:
  I'm using an external 20" Dell Planar monitor on the Ferrari. The default /etc/X11/xorg.conf gave me a maximum screen resolution for this monitor of 1024x768. From running Solaris on this machine, with this monitor, I knew that it was capable of 1280x1024. (With better monitors I had at work, I knew that it could generate much higher resolutions than that).

  On my Solaris system, I logged in as root from the command line and ran:

          # Xorg -configure
        

  This created an xorg.conf.new file under /. I copied this out to a USB disk, then booted into my Ubuntu system and merged it with the existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and came up with this one which seems to work nicely.

• Installing Thunderbird:
  You'd think this would be as simple as:

          % sudo apt-get install thunderbird
        

  but for some reason, it doesn't seem to be there for my 64-bit Ubuntu system. In the end I found another nice How To: (thanks art!), which solves this problem.

  I did take it one step further. After you've build thunderbird, the two directory hierarchies (/opt/thunderbird and /opt/thunderbird_bird) take up over 1/2 Gb of disk space. You can't just remove /opt/thunderbird_build (believe me, I tried), so I did the following:

          % sudo mkdir /opt/thunderbird-1.5
          % cd /opt/thunderbird/dist
          % tar cvhf /opt/thunderbird-1.5/thunderbird.tar .
          % cd /opt/thunderbird-1.5/
          % sudo tar xvf thunderbird.tar
          % sudo rm thunderbird.tar
          % sudo ln -s /opt/thunderbird-1.5/bin/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird
        

  That still takes up way to much space. I've sure it can be trimmed more, I'm just not sure exactly what I can safely take away.

  Sure would be nice if there were just some binary packages I could install for my 64-bit system.

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( Nov 27 2006, 08:49:00 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [5]