Installing Ubuntu on a new Tecra M5 laptop
Bought a new Tecra M5 – Ubuntu 6 Installed easily, using the try before you buy “live-CD” : first impressions good. Sound, wireless LAN (Intel 3945ABG) and NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M video working fine at correct 1400×1050 res, NTFS partition detected fine. NTFS drives seem to be mounted read-only.
The only (minor) installer bug I encountered was
Size not remembered after partition edit during install
The disk paritioner tool (which is great by the way, looks just like Partition Magic) did not pick up size changes once I had edited and resized partitions. For example, I deleted a 1GB partition and created a new one of 10GB in its place but the mount screen still showed the old value. I got round it easily by quitting after partitioning and re-starting the install.
Hibernate works well. The laptop resumes from hibernate about the same speed or faster than Windows. I need to reconnect to my wireless network, just as in Windows.
Add multimedia players/codecs and java
The rest of the setup I needed to do was just to do with installing all the multimedia packages that licensing prevents from including by default. This is something most people will want to do. Luckily it is well summarized on the wiki page. (if using adept make sure you tick unsupported and proprietary software boxes, and select packages from all)
Amarok has no sound
Easily fixed by installing “xine extra plugins” (libxine-extracodecs)
totem cannot play back xvid AVIs etc
Easily fixed by installing gstreamer plugins packages.
install realplayer so I can watch BBC news ;)
dpkg -i realplayer_10.0.7-0.0_i386.deb Now it works nicely in Firefox after a restart.
Install Java (from Sun)
dpkg-reconfigure debconf
sudo aptitude install sun-java5-jdk
sudo update-alternatives—config java
Configure things to my taste
setup hotkeys
For some reason this is under “System Settings”->“Regional and Accessibility”
change kde single click to double click
I find this easier for selecting multiple files. Do this in mouse settings.
setup nvidia driver
Went to nvidia’s linux site and checked the latest version. Saw that that latest version was indeed available from dapper’s standard repo so just did a sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx and a modprobe nvidia. You need to then set the font size correctly in /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc with a 75dpi local argument, and of course change from nv to nvidia in the xorg.conf. Then check settings using sudo nvidia-settings. There doesn’t seem to be much performance difference to the nv driver at the moment – I’ll need to run some benchmarks under both drivers to see if it’s worth doing this.
Enable CD-ROM eject button
By default you need to unmount the CD drive before pressing eject which is a bit boring so to enable the button just run sudo sh -c ‘echo “dev.cdrom.lock=0” >> /etc/sysctl.conf’.
The conclusion
Pretty smooth install. The M5 has a SD card slot which is proprietary and so probably no chance of working under Linux. I had a quick try with Bluetooth and it didn’t seem to work so I have to boot into Windows for using my cellphone on the go (I will update this entry if I ever get it working).