Mindstab.net

I've been meaning to put Ubuntu on my laptop (Nika) for a bit. The main reason being that since my laptop's fan doesn't work so well, compiling software to install it causes heating problems and is rapidly become not so practical. Today I needed something to do so the timing was right.

I couldn't be more impressed. I popped the Ubuntu 7.04 CD into my laptop and it booted into a Gnome desktop. Network manager loaded and connected to the wireless. Amazing. I launched the installer and it asked a few questions, and I did a manual partition job so as to keep my /home partition with all my data. And the presto. It started installing. I showered and when I got back it was done. I rebooted and volia. The install was done.

And I have to say, I'm very impressed with the hardware support. My wireless (atheros) and graphics (intel) work out of the box. I turned on desktop bling and I had wobbly windows and the desktop cube. Everything worked.

Well, just about. A few tiny more advanced things took me a few more minutes, but really, were still shockingly easy.

CPU frequency scaling wasn't working. But that's just Ubuntu's hardware auto detector cocking up. The p4_clockmod modules is installed so I just had to load it (modprobe p4_clockmod) and add it to /etc/modules to get it to autoload.

Also, hardware tempurature detection wasn't working once I installed the hardware sensors applet. This is because certain Toshiba Satellite laptops like mine use the Phoenix BIOS and are funky. All that was needed was the omnibook kernel module. Sadly, that wasn't in the Ubuntu repository, but there was a thread on the forums about it.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=316358&highlight=omnibook

The instructions were really quite simple. I don't know if I just didn't know this before, or if they really have worked to make it simpler, but now to get everything you need to build kernel modules, you only need two packages: 'build-essential' and 'linux-sources'. Build-essential is a meta package pulling in the whole compiler and auto tools chain. Then I got subversion, checked out the source for the omnibook module, compiled, installed it, and added it to /etc/modules for autoloading and now the hardware sensors applet is working and I can see my laptop's temperature.

So with really a trivial amount of work, I have absolutely everything on my laptop working at it's fullest. In a really short period of time. I'm very impressed. Also, now this will make it easier to keep my laptops software up to date without burning it out. Smooth work guys. Thanks for the smoothest Ubuntu install I've yet seen.