Oct 3

Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)   Posted by sharps, tagged with badger breezy sony ubuntu vaio

I've been a Linux laptop user for about four or five years but my recent laptop upgrade set me back a bit - to the point where I've been forced to use Windows XP as my primary work environment. Which, I should add, is pretty nice once you have removed the Outlook and IE cruft and added a decent mail reader and browser (and added some security). Anyway for about 9 months I've been trying to find time to take a look at some additional distro's to see if they support my Sony VAIO any better than JDS / Suse.

I was reading David Coldrick's blog entry about running NetBeans on Ubuntu - and that reminded me I really should give Ubuntu a try (after all it claims to be the Linux for Humans); so before I'd finished reading David's entry I'd kicked off a download of the Ubuntu 5.10 Live CD

I quickly burnt a DVD (I didn't know you could burn DVDs from CD images) and booted my laptop. My heart sank as the bootloader came up - the video was all messed up - indicating it had detected the wrong refresh rate or something (the Sony VAIO 1280*800 screen has given other distros problems too). Fortunately, I let the boot run its course - when the window manager started it correctly identified the screen and corrected the display. USB Mouse and sound we're all correctly identified but no wireless - again this is the area that has proven difficult for most distros due to the use of onboard Intel PRO/Wireless 2200. So I pull up the Network config tool and see that the interface has been identified correctly but it isn't enabled - I check "enabled" and it comes up. Or at least it says it has come up - when I launch Firefox - I notice that I don't actually have a any network connectivity - even though the network monitoring shows packets being transmitted and received. I don't know if Ubuntu uses the NDISWrapper to support the WP2200 - as that method has proven pretty unreliable with other distro's I have tried.

Anyway, I wasn't in the mood for a debug session so instead decided to look around the base Live CD install - all in all it seems pretty neat (though the default brown Ubuntu theme is a little depressing) and it has pretty much everything I need - though I would have to upgrade to a more recent version of Firefox and Thunderbrid, get the Cisco VPN software running and tackle the depressing APM / ACPI issues that I always anticipate with Linux and laptops. All that said, Ubuntu could well be worth investing a little more time in. I didn't manage to see if the included Totem would play DVD's out-of-the-box because you can't remove the Live CD DVD (Obviously). I'm going to order the *free* CD's and give it a try when I get some spare cycles but not before I give the latest Mandrake a spin.