Installing Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop

I got an Dell Inspiron 8000 from my Sister-in-law a couple of months ago and wanted to remove Windows ME that came with it and install Ubuntu. I popped in the Feisty install disk and booted the computer the first major snag that hit me was the screen, the screen was split into three parts and looked fuzzy. A quick search on Google told me that this was a common problem with this model and was caused by a bug in the Xorg code. I would need to tweak the refresh rates in xorg.conf to fix this. I managed to hit enter on each screen of the install wizard and completed the installation. After rebooting into my shiny new Ubuntu desktop I switched to the terminal by pressing ctrl+alt+f1, after logging in I edited the xorg.conf using the following command.

sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I then inserted the following two lines under the monitor section.

HorizSync 31-82
VertRefresh 40-110

I also changed the color depth from 24bits to 16 bits and inserted the following lines under the device section.

Option “AGPMode” “4”
Option “AGPSize” “32”
Option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
Option “Display” “BIOS”
Option “SWCursor” “true”
Option “CCEusecTimeout” “20000”

I saved the changes to the file by pressing “:w” and hitting enter. I then restarted the X server by pressing ctrl+alt+f7 and hitting ctrl+alt+backspace  this fixed the problem with the screen.

Since this Laptop didn’t come with a WiFi card I decided to get a USB WiFi adapter after some research I decide to go in for the Zyxcel G-202 USB wireless Adapter as many posts on the Ubuntu forums indicated that this particular adapter was easy to setup. The installation was a breeze and although I had to use NDISwrapper the speed is very good. The updated kernel increased performance quite a bit. I must say am pretty impressed with the new kernel and its support for WiFi devices. I am going to turn this laptop into an HTPC/Picture Frame, will post more info on that once am done with it.

Broadcom WiFi woes – update II

I spoke to the system administrator at school yesterday regarding my travails with the the crappy Broadcom card. He suggested that I try a few other distros and see if the builtin driver works on any of them. I had already tried Fedora Core and Ubuntu. I downloaded CentOS 4 and Mandriva one Live , While CentOS totally failed to detect the card Mandirva at least recognized that the card wouldn’t work out of the box and asked me to provide the windows driver ( bcmwl5.sys) I downloading a copy of the file from http://sidulus.textdrive.com/-31/bcmwl5sys

but that didn’t work either when I tried it with NDISwrapper the wizard asked me for the *.inf file which I downloaded from the HP site, It seemed that the installation went without a hitch but the WiFi gets activated only for a few seconds and goes offline. I am still stuck with a crappy card which doesn’t work in Linux.

will post more in a few days….