I started the new year falling love with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution that I run on my new desktop computer. Ever since the beauty of the Ubuntu desktop unfolded in front of my eyes for the first time, I have kept enjoying this sense of control and logic that Linux brings to personal computing – so much so that I wanted to benefit from its advantages on my old Siemens LifeBook as well. I am now running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my desktop PC and dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my notebook.
Whereas on my fresh desktop PC installing Ubuntu from the live CD had been a piece of cake, on my three-and-a-half-year-old Siemens LifeBook, I initially ran into some trouble. I, therefore, thought I might share my findings here in case others are experiencing similar problems. My most important recommendation is for users of old notebooks to use text-based installation (from the alternate distribution) rather than the standard desktop Live CD.
The starting point: My notebook
I am a very happy Fujitsu-Siemens customer. My LifeBook C1110 has proven itself to be resistant and reliable. Just to give you an idea of what it has gone through:
- I've carried it around with me nearly every day for more than three years, and it's been turned on almost every waking hour.
- I once left it standing in the pouring rain for half an hour while plugged in and turned on. Result: Had to buy a new keyboard for 30 euros. Everything else worked as fine as before once it had dried (which took 3 days and a good hair-dryer, however).
- I once spilled a full cup of coffee on it. Same as above. Had to get a new keyboard, that's it.
- It once fell on the floor from a bit more than half a metre. No damage at all.
- Someone bumped into it breaking one of the folding screen hinges. Still works perfectly even if there's less resistance when moving the screen.
That's what I call ruggedized.
As to the specs, they were not bad at the time considering the good price of just a bit more than 1000 EUR and the fact that it was one of the first affordable notebooks to have a very good wireless adapter built in:
- Intel Pentium M processor 1300MHz
- 256 MB RAM
- 40 GB hard drive
Windows XP Professional had been pre-installed and I did not want to uninstall or re-install it.
Now that I am successfully dual-booting I can confirm that with the above specs both Win XP and Unbuntu Edgy Eft run reasonably fast.
Text-based installation is not just for experts
Regarding the different Live CDs, you'll read a lot about the standard desktop live CD that's supposed to automagically get everything working out of the box. Usually, tutorials would then mention that there's also the alternate distribution; however, it is supposedly of interest only to people who want to strongly customize their system or create their own distro.
However, with the Desktop distribution of first Dapper Drake and then Edgy Eft (how do they come up with those names?), I spent hours and hours: everything would take an eternity, sometimes the computer would hang even before the Gnome desktop came up, sometimes it would freeze after I double-clicked the install icon. It was extremely frustrating – no error message whatsoever, just frozen screens at every attempt.
Eventually, I downloaded the image for the alternate distro of Edgy Eft and discovered that in fact, even for a total newbie, installing in text-mode from this distribution is as easy as installing from the live CD GUI. Obviously, you could customize much more, but you may just as well accept the defaults, and you won't have to take any more decisions than when installing from the Live CD GUI.
Re-partitioning
I won't go into much detail regarding the installation process. Basically, I just followed this excellent tutorial that was written for Dapper Drake but is equally valid for Edgy Eft. I chose to shrink my Windows/NFTS partition to 15GB, to assign 10 GB to the Ubuntu/ext3 partition and 500 MB to the swap area, making the rest (14.5GB) a FAT32 partition for easy read-write access from both operating systems. Things are working pretty well for me with this configuration. However, that's because I only use Windows when I have to, otherwise the 15GB would not be very much.
Installing Ubuntu Edgy Eft
As mentioned before, the subsequent installation process was straight-forward. It just took quite a long while (about 1 hour and 20 minutes from the moment I chose text mode installation to the moment when I first booted into Ubuntu from the hard drive). It's important not to panic when the installation process seems to hang for quite a while: When it was selecting and installing software, the progress bar suddenly stopped at 6%, the screen briefly went black and came back on just to hang for more than 10 minutes while the CD drive was apparently searching for something, making scary noises and getting so hot that you could literally fry an egg on it. But suddenly, while I was gloomily contemplating the agony of my beloved notebook and setting myself a deadline as to when I would give up and turn the machine off, the installation went on without any errors as though nothing had happened, and when I finally re-booted into Linux, everything worked fine.
The bottom-line
Summing it up:
- When having trouble installing from the desktop Live CD, just use text mode install.
- During text-based installation, don't panic or turn off your computer when the screen appears to freeze for a very long time (like 15 minutes or so): the installation might still continue and be successful.
- A lengthy and unresponsive installation procedure bears no indication as to how well Ubuntu will run on your machine once it's installed: On my notebook, it runs noticeably faster than Windows XP even though the installation process was very slow.
Ubuntu on my notebook: What works and what doesn't
Generally speaking, all the hardware was detected and configured correctly out of the box, including the wireless adapter (I am using WEP, not WPA encryption – I've got a good and trustful relationship with my neighbours). The only issue was the touchpad that keeps being a bit funny (yes, this is a technical term): At start-up it acts as though the left mouse button was being held down and I have to press it once in order to make it understand this is not the case. Moreover, the scroll buttons don't work – the upper one behaves as though it were another mouse button and the lower one does not work at all. I actually managed to fix the first issue by fiddling around with xorg.conf, but then I kept playing around with it and managed to completely mess up X server. Since I had not made any backup, I had to revert to auto-detected settings. In any case, it looks fixable – for the time being, it's not a high priority, but when I have some time I might try and fix it.
To sum it up, I find Ubuntu a handy, easy-to-use and mature distribution for laptops, and even on an old notebook with limited resources, you should be able to easily dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu.
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Stichwörter/Tags: ubuntu linux windows win xp windows xp siemens fujitsu-siemens notebook lifebook laptop dual-boot dual-booting edgy eft
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