Dell Continues to Dance with Ubuntu

Dell a few years ago started offering the option of having Ubuntu linux pre installed on some of their machines. A lot of people were excited to ear this but when it happened, noticed that having Ubuntu vs Microsoft on the Dell computer didn’t slice the price of the computers as much as they had hoped.

Well now this has all finally changed with Dell offering there new laptop the Inspiron 15n with Ubuntu Linux. This new laptop is not a netbook and has great specs for an extremely low price of $299!!! The specs of the base $299 laptop are:

• Intel® Celeron® 585 (1MB cache/2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB)
• Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 8.10
• Glossy, widescreen 15.6 inch display (1366×768)
• 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 800MHz
• SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD
• 8X CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive)
• Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini-Card

Now if you ask me that is an amazing steal for a laptop and I see this as yet another stride on brining Ubuntu to the mainstream public.

If you would like to buy or customize the dell inspiron 15n check it out here on the Dell Website.

Upgraded to 9.04 and internet broke!

I just upgraded my dell xps m1530 to 9.04 and all hell broke loose. Wireless internet not working. If you want to follow how peopel help me fix it or you think you have an idea, check out this post to see what were workign on:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7351615&posted=1#post7351615

Changing Permissions of Locked Folders in Ubuntu Linux

Terminal Comfort is a way to get more comfortable using the terminal in Ubuntu linux. Today we are going to talk about locked folders. Many newer users who are not comfortable with the terminal get by all right today with linux because it has become so much more user friendly over the years. But every once in a while a user of linux who is not comfortable using the terminal, will accidental do something such as luck a folder and will not know what to do.

Read the rest here!

Ubuntu Going Mainstream? Can you says Bestbuy

Ubuntu is officially going mainstream to some degree. You are now able to buy Ubuntu at Bestbuy stores or at the online Bestbuy stores!! O wait did i just say buy? I…did….Bestbuy is selling free Ubuntu Software for $20.

Lets not start going crazy about Bestbuy selling free software. Conical teamed up with Valusoft to offer this boxed Ubuntu installation software at Bestbuy, and part of the deal is 60 days of support from Valusoft to help you out with Linux.

Although I would never myself buy something that I can download for free, I find this great for multiple reasons. Firstly with Linux going on the shelves of such a huge and popular computer store this is great advertising for Ubuntu. Ubuntu now will be able to be easily discovered by the average non computer geek. People who have never even heard of Ubuntu will now be able to discover linux. But who knows if they will actually be adventurous enough to buy it.

Another plus to this is that Ubuntu now has a source of income to make a profit to fuel the development of Ubuntu. I hope this helps spread Linux and specifically Ubuntu into the general public. What do you guys think?

It Only Took a Month

After recievign my new Dell XPS m1530 laptop with Vista, it only lasted a month with Vista….But getting linux on this machine was no easy task. It took a lot of work and I doubt  anew Linux adopter would be able to succefullly do this. It took my a whoel lot of googleing an dlots and lots of time in the Ubuntu forums and I prettty much have it workign smoothly now!!!

The first road bump in getting Ubuntu running on my Dell xps m1530 laptop had to do with the touchpad. The touchpad on th elaptop was pretty much useless, it woudl just go crazy. After googleing it was eventually easy enough to find a how to for addign soem special command to the kernal line, and now all works great.

The biggest and most trouble some problem was getting my laptops wireless to work in Ubuntu. Ubuntu unfortunetly did not recognize wifi car at all. This was a major bummer because what is  a laptop if you cant get wireless internet?

The wireless card on my Dell xps m1530 is a Dell Wireless 1505 Wireless-N Mini-card

To gte this to work I spent a long long time in the irc and someone super friendly helped me out. Below I will post the logg of our conversation:

Wireless Diver dell Ubuntu How to – Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Wireless Diver dell Ubuntu How to

well let’s see
nope lol lol
or maybe i did register but dont remeber Well, ndiswrapper generallly works better with XP drivers, but I suppose we can try it with Vista ones.
ok What you’re going to want to do is extract the driver to some directory you can get to from Linux.
hmmm ur loosing me already You’re new to this whole seen, aren’t you? :p *scene
i have been usign linux for liek 5 years now but new to this wrapper thing and usually all my hardware has been detected lol but i can get around terminal etc, usually but i have been off of linux for a month and hated vista I understand
sso now i am back Well, do you have Windows at all?
yes i partitioned the hd so i have hardy and vista okay Well, go to Dell’s website, download the driver for your card.
ok I have it here, but I don’t think I can file transfer from this channel.
could you just upload it to www.mediafire.com I’ll link you
thanks appreciate it http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/downloads/en/downloads_ splash?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~mode=popup&file=236824
alrighty that is downloading thanks It needs to be run from Vista, of course, ’cause it’s an exe.
oooo so do i need to log out? and logg into vista? When you extract it, direct it to a folder that you can easily get to in Linux
or can i sue wine? I don’t know, you might be able to use Wine, just for the sake of extraction. It’s worth a shot I guess.
ok so shall i give it a try to use wine go right ahead
if i remember correctly i just cd to the desktop then do a wine filewname.exe ok so it said it sucesfully extracked but then crashe dinstallign but i from what i understand we just needed to extract it? yes
ok so whats next Well, assuming Ubuntu can read your Windows partition, (which it should), now we need ndiswrapper and ndisgtk
ok so sudo apt-get install both? yes, though I can’t remember their exact package names.
i will search synaptic then ok i found them and they are all being installed whats next one minute
ok run ndisgtk
ok in the terminal would be easiest
yes i did then a thing opened i then can pick to install new driver and i have to pick a file, what file do i pick? the inf file I THINK you want is bcmwl6 in the driver subfolder.
ok so i need to find where i extracted it to? yep
do u know where wine puts its c directory in linux? found it no clue, I know that in Windows, the default directory is C:\dell\drivers\R174292 oh okay
so i am looking for a .inf file type? yes
bcmwl6.inf is that the one? I’m PRETTY sure……
ok lets give it ago ok i installed it now what Try the command, ndiswrapper -l
mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ ndiswrapper -l bcmwl6 : driver installed device (14E4:4328) present mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ that’s a very good sign
nice now: sudo depmod -a
ok that didnt give me an output it shouldn’t have
good then lol now: sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
ok that didnt give me an output either but i assuem its not supposed to either nope
cool u have no idea how long i have been tryign to get everythign workign on this lapto pin linux lol actually, with ndisgtk, these last couple commands probably weren’t needed, but they don’t hurt
i feel liek were almost there thast ok, better safe then sorry Now, if you go into System->Administration->Network, you SHOULD have a wireless connection listed.
i dont think soo…. i will send u a screenshot here: http://photie.com/photo/9484/original err…….Okay then
plan b? Let’s go back to the terminal and check something.
ok Show me the output of: ifconfig er, rather, just tell me if you see wlan0 listed
mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1d:09:5f:37:0b inet addr:192.168.1.103 Bcast:192.168.1.127 Mask:255.255.255.128 inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe5f:370b/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:111754 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:75635 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:150187774 (143.2 MB) TX bytes:8255674 (7.8 MB) Interrupt:16 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:4200 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:4200 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:210000 (205.0 KB) TX bytes:210000 (205.0 KB) mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ oo ok lol um… i dont see it do u? nope darn it
so whast that tell us *huff* that google is our last hope? lol
damn i have been googling this for days and havent found or understood much i heard alot abotu this wrapper thigny u have anymore ideas? I just read a forum post saying there’s been [shaky] success with this driver: http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXE
hmmm so i cant get wireless on my laptop in linux? Well, let’s just try this other driver before we totally give up.
ok which one is that The one I just sent
lol, sorry i am a little out of it downloading now, then i will extract it etc yep
just let me knwo what the file name is i will b elookign for with the wrapper thingy ndis is actually pretty simple after you’ve done it once
yea The file is named bcmw15.inf It’s probably also in a driver subfolder or something.
ok ok its installed hwo do i test if it works again? first, ndiswrapper -l
mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ ndiswrapper -l bcmwl5 : driver installed device (14E4:4328) present bcmwl6 : driver installed device (14E4:4328) present mike@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ good
ok sudo depmod -a
ok sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
ok ifconfig, is wlan0 there?
yes good, now try sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
ok that gave me nothing look in the upper-right corner of the screen
yes Do you see anything there?
nothign new Well, first of all, is your wireless turned on?
ooo on my network thing it sees networs now networks yep
great!!! thanks sooo much hang on if i am ogign to pick a wireless network cool u still there i think i am wireless now

Firefox 3 Update in Hardy

I recently updated my system of Ubuntu Hardy Heron through synaptic, and when I was done I noticed a new thing in my Firefox 3 browser:

Its a most Visited drop down menu. When you click it, your most visited websites drop down for you to see and easily access.

Ultra-portable Ubuntu Laptop

I was away for the weekend so I havent posted in while, but I got some cool news now. In one of my posts last week, I posted about how Ubuntu is building a flavor of their distribution for ultra-portable laptops. Now in that same article I wrote about how maybe Ubuntu should get into the market of building their own computer line, and selling them to the general public like Asus.Some comments were made on my post, saying Ubuntu does not have the resources to do this and that they should just concentrate on building the operating system. Well now that I think about it, that is why they teamed up with Dell in the first place.

Dell as most of you know sells a Ubuntu line of Linux computers. Dell now is building an Ultra-portable laptop, and plans to sell a version running Ubuntu Linux on it. Now we know why Ubuntu has made a flavor just for an ultra-portable laptop, so it can work flawlessly with the new Dell ultra-portable!

Cant wait to see it hit the market!

Should Cononical Sell Computers?

I was recently reading an article on Engadget, about how Ubuntu will be releasing a version that will be specific for ultraportable laptops. With the recent success of the Eee pc, and now many other companies starting to build there own ultra portable laptops, why doesn’t Ubuntu not only create and operating system, but also create and sell computers with there operating systems on them?

If Conanicol built and sold an ultraportable laptop, I would definitely make a purchase. Why would Ubuntu want to make an ultraportable laptop to sell though? Well first it would help bring in a little more income for the company and allow them to expand there efforts is creating a free operating system.

Also Ubuntu like Asus did with the Eee pc could try and get into more mainstream markets, thus brining more of the public to the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

What are your thoughts?

Added the Idea to Ubuntu Brainstorm if you want to vote it up.

Dual-booting Windows and Linux the easy way

Dual booting Linux and Windows is a great way to try using Linux. Dual booting is having both Linux and Windows operating systems on your one computer at once. This works by creating multiple partitions and having each operating system go on different partitions etc. but what the heck does that actually mean?

To make it simple, you have both operating systems on one computer and when you turn your computer on, you just pick which operating system you want to use, and that one will boot up. The convenience of having a dual boot system is if you are not sure you want to make the switch to Linux from windows you can try out Linux on your computer without loosing your windows install.

In the past creating a dual boot system wasn’t exactly easy. Who wants to do hours of research to figure out how to partition a hard drive? And even if you research all that you may partition it and still make a small mistake and you could risk loosing everything on your computer! So how can one easily dual boot Linux and Windows without risking destroying their whole system? Well the answer is wubi….

Read the Rest here!!!!!

Shuttleworth on Ubuntu Release Cycle

Mark Shuttleworth the man behind Ubuntu, writes a nice blog posts on his blog about the release cycle of Ubuntu. If you haven’t read it and are a Ubuntu fan, I would go check it out.

One thing Shuttleworth does mention is that he will consider changing the release cycles if they can synchronize them. For example what if the Linux Kernel, Gnome, Kde and even big software providers such as Open office got onto the same schedule? Imagine the power in that! I think if all the different parts that made up a linux distribution got onto the same schedule it would be great, what do you all think of this idea?