I have been experimenting with Linux for several years and have been pleased by the progress Linux has made in that time. During the time that I have been experimenting with Linux, the Achilles heel has always been hardware support. When I first tried Linux the problem was with support for my Winmodem. More recently, the problem was with the Realtek 8187b wifi card in my Toshiba laptop. A few weeks ago I salvaged a Broadcom wifi card out of a dead computer and tried it in my Toshiba. Since then, Ubuntu 9.04 has been running very well. At some point I might write more of my thoughts on the status of running Linux on desktops, but the main purpose of this post is to make a record of the steps I went through to tweak Ubuntu for my laptop and my preferences.
ATI Radeon X1200 Video
I had an annoying flicker with the video. To resolve that I installed a development version of the ATI driver that is shown with this bug in Launchpad https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/35....
Realtek 8187b Wifi
If your computer has this wifi card installed, don't bother trying Linux until you buy a different wifi card. There are some attempts to workaround some of the bugs in this completely dysfunctional driver, but the end result is still a bad experience. If you enjoy pain, or are as hard-headed/cheap as I was here are some pointers.
- The Delicious Robots blog has a tip.
- There is a bug report in Launchpad that includes a suspend script.
System Beep
Another annoyance with the default installation of Ubuntu 9.04 was the system beep. It came through the system speaker instead of the sound card so it ignored the system volume setting. To disable the system beep, I edited the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file. Add the following line to that file blacklist pcspkr.
Summary
I now have a system that runs beautifully. The difference compared to Ubuntu with the Realtek wifi card is like night and day. Also the boot, shutdown, suspend and resume are all much faster than the Vista installation that is still on a separate partition (but hasn't been used for several weeks).
