Installation of Ubuntu 12.04 on a Dell Studio 1747

Just finished installing Ubuntu 12.04. A breeze to do. The whole process took less than an hour. Really fast.

Because I messed up the Ubuntu 11.10 (installed to much junk), I decided to start of with a clean sheet.

Because my documents are on a separate partition /home (actually it's even an different disk), it's easy to replace the OS and keep your data.

Because the hardware contains some specials, I had to enable some propriety software. The video hardware is from ATI, which has it's own driver you have to enable.

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
02:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series]

The Broadcom wireless card driver was enabled by default.

The only thing I keep forgetting is the audio. The normal speakers work fine. But the headphones are something you have to enable. Just add options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6 to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and reboot.

The last thing to do was to install chromium, virtual box, calibre and 7zip, and that's it.

Thunderbird, Firefox, Chromium, Calibre, they all found there previous settings.

Ready to go.

First impressions?

Being used to unity, it looks the same. Tidy and fast. I like the bar with the applications by the side.

replacing the HD in a netbook with a SSD

A couple of months ago I bought a Solid State Disk to replace the Hard disk in my Netbook (an asus eee pc 1005 HA).
I've choosen an OCZ Vertex Plus drive with 60 GB of space.
Why replacing a perfectly good drive ? Well, for the speed of an ssd, the extra time you get out of the battery, and last but not least, to get some experience with SSD drive's.
The OCZ Vertex Plus is a SATA II drive, fast enough for the eee's sata port. 60 GB is more than enough for a computer mostly used for surfing and reading. The Vertex Plus seemed the right choice for an reasonable price (meaning, it's cheap).
Opening the asus and replacing the drive was rather easy, with many thanks to the posters on youtube.
Next step was installing an OS. I've choosen the ubuntu 11.04, the os that was on the netbook before the replacement of the disk.
Booting from an USB stick and installing was easy.
But then came the cold shower. After rebooting the netbook, nothing was found on the disk.
Trying the who installation process again, but alas, no success.
Surfing for solutions, I found out that the Vertex Plus had major issues with certain chip sets. The Intel 945 chip sets, as used in thee eee pc corrupted the boot sector (as seen here).
The first firmware upgrade (version 3.5) did nothing to solve the problem.
But the second firmware upgrade to version 3.55 solved the problem.
The netbook is now humming away with ubuntu 11.10. Booting the machine is fast, very fast. Overal response is fast as well. The old netbook now feels a lot snappier.