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.

upgrading from ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10

After trying out the new Ubuntu on the net book, I decided to take the plunge and upgraded the main computer as well. But being careful I took some precautions. The hard drive is split up in 3 partitions, the partition with rot, another for the /home partition and a swap partition. First another backup with "back in time (root)" for the /home partition, then a copy of the root with dd to an external drive (dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/extdrive/sda2.img bs=1024. The upgrade is done through the update manager. The whole process went smooth an took about 45 minutes. Rebooting and logging in. First time took some extra time, but everything worked as expected. Even better, wireless was stable this time, no more freezing of the whole computer anymore. Only the printer will take some time, but Canon makes good printers, but with lousy Linux integration. Ubuntu 11.10 looks nice and clean, and nice to the eyes. Because most of my (computer) life goes on in a browser, the os is not that important to me. I rather likes a clean GUI with less bells than an overload GUI, or better who hides the lot for me.