The Twilight Sun

Having installed Ubuntu myself, I ran into a few annoying (but fixable) problems. I have an HP Pavillion dv900 series laptop, with the touch-sensitive media buttons and a built in wireless receiver. When I installed Ubuntu, I found that (a) my wireless connector wouldn’t work, and (b) that my audio wouldn’t work.

And later, when I fixed (b), I found that Pandora wouldn’t work either. Oh, the horror!

I talked with my Ubuntu-using friend again – knowing another Linux user is a great help! – and I found I had to use something called "ndiswrapper" to use the Windows drivers I had for Linux, to fix my wireless problems. Let’s see if I can dig up the link he gave me… Here it is. Starting from section 3.3, I followed the instructions, and it worked. The only problem is that the light next to the on/off switch for the wireless is always orange, it never turns green (on). But that doesn’t affect the fact that it works.

The audio problem… slightly trickier. I actually can’t remember what fixed it, but it was a pain to solve. I guess I wasn’t very helpful on this one.

And Pandora.com, the problem seemed to be that I didn’t have Flash installed, but when I installed it, it still didn’t work.. suffice to say, it was annoying to try to fix, but eventually I got it.

I can’t overstate the importance of being able to talk with someone else who has Ubuntu while doing this. It’s a huge help.

Recently, I was chatting with someone on IRC who ran the Ubuntu distro of Linux on his computer. I’ve been wanting to try Linux for ages, but I never really succeeded (mostly because I was worried about partitioning my hard drive…).  This time, though, this person helped me the whole way, and now that I’ve done it and know the steps, I found it actually pretty painless.

(Except, if you have an HP Pavilion dv900 series, there’s a lot of hardware difficulties between it and the "Gutsy" version of Ubuntu.. so go for Feisty until Hardy comes out. More on that in another post.)

I’ll put down the steps I personally had to follow, but before I get started, there’s a liability issue I want to get out of the way. These instructions may work for you, and they may not. You follow them at your computer’s risk. Notably, I think the partitioning may be the most potentially dangerous.

First, you’ll want to download either the "Gutsy" or "Feisty" Ubuntu .iso from ths page. Save it somewhere (Desktop works), and open (or download then open) a program that can burn .iso files to a CD. I myself used UltraISO’s free trial.

Run UltraISO (or whatever you decided to use), and open the Ubuntu ISO file you downloaded before. Put a blank CD (NOT DVD, supposedly that won’t work) in your disc drive. I can’t remember what I selected to burn the iso to the CD, but it’s more than likely in the Tools menu. Make sure you’re burning the ISO to the CD, and not to some other format on your hard drive.

Let the burning process go through, and the CD tray will probably eject. This new CD is your Ubuntu "LiveCD". You can put it back in your computer, then restart, and your system should boot from the LiveCD instead of from the hard drive. The LiveCD will boot Ubuntu up purely in RAM, and almost anything you do from the LiveCD Ubuntu will be as though you had never done it when you boot down from Ubuntu and remove the CD. This means, it’s a good testing ground to make sure Ubuntu will work with your system.

Play around with Ubuntu a little from here (WARNING: It IS possible to botch things on your other OS from here, but it’s generally obvious when you do), and get a feel for it. The two taskbars can be dragged to the top or bottom of the screen; the equivalent of Windows’ "Start" menu is called "Applications" and has the Ubuntu logo on it. plus there are Places and System menus as well.

When you decide to go with Ubuntu, you have two options, only one of which I’ll be going into (the other is pretty straightforward anyways). You can either partition your hard drive (taking space from your other OS and leaving it free for what we’re doing), or you can uninstall/reformat your drive (in which case, MAKE A BACKUP, because EVERYTHING WILL GO.) We’ll handle the partitioning pathway, which will result in a dual-boot system with both Windows and Ubuntu on it. And I’ll assume you’re running Vista, even though in all likelyhood you’re not. Look up an Ubuntu chatroom and ask for help there if you’re on XP, or something else.

Alright. Boot down from Ubuntu, remove the disc, and restart. You should be in Vista now. Unless you want to potentially lose files or break Windows, you’ll want to run the Disc Defragmenter first. When that’s done, go to Start, right-click Computer, and select Disc Management. Yes, I didn’t know it did that either. You’ll want to select your Windows partition (it’s labled), and find the Shrink option.

 The Shrink utility will calculate how much space can be freed up, and put that value in the input box. Unless you’ll be using Windows a lot more (and Ubuntu’s worth it when you have the know-how to work it to your will), you might as well leave the system-generated value as it is. Click OK.

Like I said, this is the dangerous part, especially if you didn’t defrag your drive like I said. After it finishes, put your LiveCD in the drive, and restart your computer. You’ll notice, if you look around, that nothing you did when you had the LiveCD in before, is there. That’s the point of a LiveCD: testing and getting a feel for it. (And it comes in handy when you need to fix something on a computer you can’t boot into the default OS on, I hear)

Click Install on the desktop, and follow the instructions. When you get to the part asking you what partition to install, most likely you’ll need to select "largest continuous free space". This will select the area we freed from Vista by Shrink’ing it.

And now, give it some time to install. When it’s done, restart (and REMOVE THE LIVECD, or you’ll boot into the LiveCD instead of your new Ubuntu installation), and you’ll come up with the "GRUB" boot handler. Now… depending on certain factors, you might have two "identical" Windows options. One of them is your system restore partition that the manufacturer made for you. It might be a good time to learn which is the restore partition, and which is your real Vista OS, now.

And now you get to boot into Ubuntu. We’re done! Next post, you get to find out what problems I ran into on my HP Pavilion dv9000 series laptop.

One VERY VERY useful Linux program is Wine, which allows you to run Windows programs from Linux. The existance of Wine is the only reason I decided to try Linux, and it’s really, really useful. If you’re planning on getting into Ubuntu, check out Wine (and more importantly, its known-supported-programs AppDB).