Laptop Linux

I went along to my first ever Dun-LUG (website down at the mo for some DNS-related reason) and had a good old natter with some of the local members. I also got a copy of Ubuntu linux (a variant of Debian) and decided that based on the number of people there with Linux on their laptops that I’d take the plunge as well and install it on mine.

It went well … but the driver support out of the box was lacking, so much so that I wasn’t able to configure my Atheros based Wifi adapter (from what I’ve read I see that Atheros is like the NE1000 range of NIC’s - widely supported and emulated). After struggling with that problem for a day (it was keeping my new Ubuntu-top off the Internet, making support and diagnosis a pain in the backside) I decided to roll back to a dual-boot system.

I used the Toshiba system restore CD (and quickly un-installed it’s AOL nastiness, et. al) and then used ntfs-resize to resize the C: drive from 60GB (100% of disk) to 35GB which should give gave me plenty of room to install Ubuntu. I had to do it this way because the Toshiba CD wouldn’t give me the option of installing WinXP to a particular partition - it wanted the whole lot.

After that, I ran the Ubuntu install (it’s “Warty” by the way, “Hoary” is available but beggers can’t be choosers!) and created two partitions for it, /dev/hda2 (ext3) and /dev/hda3 (swap). Grub happily installed into /dev/hda0 and auto-detected Windows XP and added it to the boot menu. A quick tweak to the grub config file and a call to update-grub was all that was needed to set the default OS to WinXP and set some nice colours.

I then downloaded VMWare Workstation 5.0 (eval) and I have my WinXP system set up so that I can boot Ubuntu directly from the hard drive (no virtual disk files thank you very much) and if I want to boot Ubuntu properly all I need to do is reboot my laptop and choose Ubuntu at the Grub prompt. This gives me the flexibility of having Internet access in Ubuntu (via VMWare’s bridged networking) so that I can resolve the Wifi issue.

Fun and games! The scary thing is that it works nicely I did have to install gcc and linux-headers from the Ubuntu CD for the vmware-tools package to successfully install. This allows Xwindows to run properly inside VMWare, plus some other neat things like shared folders between host and guest OS’s.