Burn My Time
~Josh Houghtelin
Ubuntu at first glance. (on a laptop)
The last 6+ years I’ve spent working with Linux has been mostly spent at the command prompt. It’s crazy how far it’s come. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop last week which requires practicly zero ‘real’ knowledge of Linux to install and use. I almost can’t believe they’ve made it so simple.
My main workstation is a Acer TravelMate 2450 (2451WlCi) low end laptop.
Intel® Celeron® M Processor 410 (1MB L2 cache, 1.46GHz, 533MHz FSB);
512MB (256/2) DDR2 533 SDRAM;
40GB hard drive;
integrated CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive;
15.4″ WXGA (1280 x 800) TFT display;
integrated ATI® Radeon® Xpress 200M graphics;
four-cell lithium ion battery;
802.11b/g WLAN,
10/100 LAN, V.92
Ubuntu installed without a hitch. It supported the native screen resolution fresh off the install. Sound, Wireless, and Ethernet were all detected and installed fine. Off the top of my head I can’t think of anything that didn’t ‘work’ fresh out of the box. I did end up installing video drivers from ATI which sped things up a bit. VMware Player installed without any problems which lets me run all the software at work that requires Windows. No turning back now huh? It didn’t take long to get MP3 support since Ubuntu is 100% completely open source and doesn’t come packaged with liscence/fee bearing software such as MP3 codecs.
Most of the software I use on a daily basis is cross platform so setting up my working enviornment with Audacity, VideoLan, a PHPeditor, Firefox, Instant Messanger, VNC, and openoffice (which comes installed) wasn’t in the slightest bit difficult.
The power management is kindof goofy. At first the machine would immediately suspend itself if I unplugged the power. That cleared up when I changed the ‘close laptop lid’ option to ‘do nothing’ (although you wouldn’t think that’d be the cause of the problem). Ubuntu doesn’t seem to be too viscious to my underpowered battery when it is unplugged and it still runs pretty darn quick as far as I’m concerned. Overall I’m glad Ubuntu works so well and has become so easy to use. It definately makes it easier to convert the desktops at work to Linux that don’t heavily rely on M$ to function properly. Shouldn’t be overly difficult ^_^
3 comments
I myself was overlay impressed with the easy of installing Ubuntu. My job requires that I use windows, and I have never successfully been able to get any distro to dual boot with Windows. That is until I discovered Ubuntu.
Have you had any issues with your wireless card? Mine will work fine and then all of a sudden, it stops and I have to re-initialize it.
I don’t really care for openoffice, but with the rise of apps like Google apps and Zoho, I can see putting people over on Ubuntu.
Aside from my wireless nic not comming on unless I press the hard-wird on/off button for it every time right as the OS boots, everything works great!
I love google’s online apps.
Posted by Josh Houghtelin, on March 27th, 2007, às 8:20 pm. #.
Hey, there…
I actually had some trouble installing Ubuntu on my identical (well, save for the HDD which is only 20GB) Acer Travelmate 2450. It seemed to have returned with ‘file not found’ type errors running down the screen after the initial screens (i.e. the first two Ubuntu Logo/Status screens)…
Strangly enough, Knoppix Live CD had similar problems. Is there some settings in the BIOS I may have to change or something to get these errors to disappear? It’s really bugging me because I’m going to start switching over (slowly at first) to Linux to avoid Asta La VISTA from Micro$oft… You’ve obviously had success here, so I’m hoping you can give me a pointer or two…
Oh, another distro that didn’t do anything at ALL on this machine was DamnSmallLinux (I am not sure if I got the right package though…going to try a different one in a few) which claims to be bootable off a thumb drive (which I extracted it to).
At any rate, Ubuntu seems the way to go and it also seems the trouble may be something I have done…
If you could give me a few pointers on prerequisites for my system to get this bastard running, I’d appreciate it… if you aren’t able to retrieve the email from your required field to post here, it’s hakyoku AT gmail.
I appreciate any kind of help you can give me…after googling ACER “Travelmate 2450″ Linux yours was one of only 2 hits. 
