The Linux Extremist

Over a year ago, I bought a laptop that I thought would be powerful enough to handle Windows for a while. I know there are some Linux folk who are probably screaming, “Heretic, heretic, kill the unbeliever!”

However, hear me out - I only wanted Windows so I could play “Rome: Total War”. It’s an intensive, great game, and it doesn’t look like Cedega or Wine are up to utilising it yet on Linux.

I digress. After one year of Windows, the laptop had pretty much ground to a halt. It was no slouch either -

Pentium IV, 3.6 Ghz

2 GB of RAM

60 GB hard drive, 7200 RPM

ATI Radeon X800 128MB Video Ram

Yet with all that power, patch after Windows patch led it to the same destination that all Windows machines arrive at - nowhere.

The good news is that once Linux is installed, it works extremely well. The bad news is that it requires fiddling with the video and wireless settings to get there.

Before you start, ensure your laptop is plugged in via a cable to your broadband router; you are going to need it. Fortunately the ethernet card works out of the box.

Display

I chose to tackle the display issues first. Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal and type the following:

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

sudo depmod -a

sudo aticonfig –initial

sudo aticonfig –overlay-type=Xv

Reboot. You may find that the setting of the screen is still too “in your face”, i.e., set at 1024 x 768. Go into Terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down and you will see entries like this -

Monitor “Generic Monitor”
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 1
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″

Insert “1680×1050″ before every instance you see of “1024×768″.

Reboot. Your screen should now be lovely.

Wireless

Unfortunately with this model they included an Inprocomm wireless card, which has a chipset that has no native Linux driver. This may have changed over time, however. The K90 comes with a purple CD ROM marked “Communication Products - WLAN Driver & Utlility, Bluetooth Driver & Utility”. On this CD go into the following folders - Software, then WLAN Software, then IPN2220 Driver, then winnt. Click, hold, drag and drop these files onto the Desktop -

neti2220.inf

i2220ntx.sys

Open the Terminal and type the following:

cd Desktop

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils

This will install ndiswrapper, which will adapt your Windows drivers to work with Linux. Once it’s done installing type the following

sudo ndisrwapper -i neti2220.inf

sudo depmod -a

sudo ndiswrapper -m

Just to make sure all is well, type:

sudo ndiswrapper -l

You should get the following response:

Installed ndis drivers:
neti2220 driver present, hardware present
Reboot. The wireless card can then be configured by going into System > Administration > Networking. It should pick the wireless card as wlan0.

You may notice that the reading on the wireless card is always 100% or if you’re out of range, 0%. That’s because the windows drivers do not contain a facility to guage signal strength. Otherwise, however, performance is excellent…and Linux on a SavRow is more than fast…it’s luxurious.

I recently started working for a publishing company as their Development Manager. I love it here, but there are things which fall under the “effing mess” category. The website for the company, and its IT infrastructure deserve this classification - hence why I was hired to sort it all out.

You would think that for such a big task, there would be a PC waiting for me. Not so - in fact, I’m on week 2 and I had been using my personal laptop to do my work. I got tired of it, so I started looking around the office, once I actually had an office and desk of my own, to see what I could come up with.

The company had stashed away some very old Dells in a cupboard - we’re talking systems from the Pentium II era with 128 MB of RAM. Knowing that the new Xubuntu variant of Ubuntu is supposed to be for low end machines, I gave it a try. While apparently they could boot up the Live CD, the installer was too much, it crashed.

Fortunately I managed to dig up a Pentium III Dell Dimension XPS T600 with a bit more than 400 MB of RAM. It had very strange things - such as two CD drives and two graphics cards. I removed the graphics cards and one of the drives. I put in an old GeForce4 MX 420 card I had lying around, along with an old spare MA311 Netgear PCI wireless card; I then proceeded to install Xubuntu.

The installation was near painless - the system performs, while not particularly speedily, sufficiently and at the very least, one can use a modern browser and office software without a problem. The sole difficulty I had was with hooking up a printer - the printer management software that came with XFce (the graphical interface bundled with Xubuntu) was next to useless. It is far better to use CUPS, which can be accessed using http://localhost:631/.

So kudos to the Xubuntu development folks  - it’s a modern OS that runs off of dust-encrusted rubbish, a rare feat indeed.

I still wish my company would give me the promised laptop however!

Firefox is a great browser on its own. On Linux, it is the fastest browser I’ve experienced (Opera comes close).

It is possible to make this fast, light browser even faster. Just follow these tips, which have been circulating on the web and now reproduced here:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows: Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection the load times should be reduced substantially. Firefox on Linux is decidedly the fastest browsing experience.

Linux can be problematic to install on laptops. However, on a 2 year old Compaq nx7000, barring two minor hiccups, it was extremely easy.

My laptop has the following specification:

1. Centrino (1.5) processor

2. ATI Radeon 9200 (64 MB Video RAM)

3. 1.2 GB of RAM (after having installed a 1 GB RAM module - relatively inexpensive)

4. 80 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM hard drive (I replaced the 4200 rpm Hitachi Travelstar with this)

5. Intel 802.11b wireless card.

6. Soundblaster compatible sound with special “media” keys to raise or lower volume and mute sound.

Some items I added myself - unsatisfied with the speed of the in-built wireless card, I bought the following PCMCIA wireless card - a US Robotics Wireless Turbo PC Card (Model 5410).

Most of these items work straight out of the box on the installation of Ubuntu, including the special media keys (it should be mentioned that these keys do not work with the Xubuntu or Kubuntu variants). The two exceptions were the additional Wireless card, which required the following minor adjustment -

Go into Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

Type:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Enter your password; Gedit, a text editor will boot. Then add the following line to the document:

options acx firmware_ver=1.2.1.34

Save the file and close Gedit down. Reboot.

The card should be working now, but it will not be your default interface until you set it up under System > Administration > Networking; to make doubly sure, unconfigure the eth1 interface which is likely to be the native wireless chipset. Also ensure the wireless monitor is picking up on the card by double clicking on it. The US Robotics card should be the wlan0 option.

The other hiccup has to do with 3D acceleration. The latest ATI drivers do not function with it; the native ati driver installed with the OS should be fine for the moment until ATI corrects the problem. Overall however, the experience was easy and it appeared to outperform a Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X on most tasks - though I must emphasise getting the new hard drive and additional memory certainly added to the laptop’s abilities.
.

Welcome to the blog of a writer, technologist and thorough eccentric. Here I will post information not only about Linux, but about life, politics and entertainment, or indeed that takes my fancy.

This will also be the scene of some very great rants worthy of Al Pacino’s carpet chewing performances.

Please feel free to contribute and participate in the forum.