Quick report about Ubuntu 7.04 on an Aspire 5102WLMi

After my previous attempt (on my older TravelMate laptop) I decided to give a newer version of Ubuntu (7.04) a try on my newer Aspire 5102 laptop.

I'm glad to say that it actually works fairly well, a summary can be seen below:

Positive points

• Fast and easy installation (everything was recognised and worked straight away.
• Easy installation for the fglrx AMD/ATi driver through the Restricted Drivers manager.
• Wi-Fi worked out of the box with supplied driver (Atheros chip).
• My external (Belkin) bluetooth adapter worked fine after installing a Gnome bluetooth applet with my phone.
  

Negative points

• Hibernation / Suspend-to-RAM doesn't work properly after resuming from either.
• Didn't mount my FAT32 and NTFS partitions with write permissions by default (may be some setting I forgot about, though).
• Needs Automatix (or similar) to enable most kinds of multimedia playback (since propriety codecs are not included by default).

All-in-all I'm not dissapointed with how it works on this laptop. Biggest drawback is the Hibernation / Suspend-to-Ram issues but those I can live with for the moment.

Hopefully, a more extensive review will be made available at a later date.

Guitar madness!

I took the liberty of filming myself earlier... Please follow links to see some guitar action.

Wrathchild
Guitarrissimo
Futureal


Can't really upload any more videos to space constraints. However, I'll see if I can tweak these so that I would fit more on the server, perhaps...

The new laptop...

So... A new laptop it is... No Lenovo, though. The final decision came to if I wanted a GB of RAM or not. Since I wanted that and not pay anything extra for it I bought another Acer.

My new Acer Aspire 5102WLMi is by far the best laptop I've had so far, both conecrning pure performance and looks.

A note for other Aspire 5100 series users, though; The ATI Radeon Xpress1100 is not properly detected by the supplied chipset driver. However, if you visit the American Acer support site you'll find a driver which correctly recognises the chipset in the laptop.

I'll be more careful with this one compared to my old TravelMate I hope. :-)

New laptop on the way?

Since my Acer laptop is kind of on its las leg I've been entertaining thoughts on a replacement for it.

My first thought is something with a bit more quality. Lenovo, HP and ASUS came to mind straight away. The Lenovo 3000 N100 offers very good value for money with a Core Duo, widescreen display and good memory, HDD and battery life. It even includes Bluetooth and all this for a mere ~530 pounds. Since I'm not interested in upgrading to something substantially better than my Acer this fits the bill perfectly.

We'll see what happens. I need to find someone who'll buy my old Acer laptop as well. But who would like to buy a laptop that hardlocks whenever you're using the network connections?!

Acer TravelMate 4601LCi + Ubuntu info

If you're interested in running Ubuntu Linux (Dapper Drake) on this laptop you might be interested in the following document.

It goes into some of the details on how to get it working and what is actually working.

Tha laptop is based on the same chassis and motherboard as the 4100-series so you should be able to use those with the same guide. Make sure it's the version with regular DDR1 memory. Acer made two versions of these laptops and this guide is for the ones with the DDR1 memory (not DDR2).

My laptop - Windows = almost true!

So, after a couple of weeks with Ubuntu installed on my laptop I'm finally coming to grips with how everything works. I've still got my Windows partition lying around on the HDD which I'm keen to get rid of in due time.

I've come a step closer now by visiting VMWare's website and downloading their VMWare Server release candidate. This turns out to be my saviour for my Windows-only software I need to be able to do any work.

I've been experimenting the last few days and got VMWare Server going with a fresh Windows XP installation and all the software I need is now easily accessible from Ubuntu now! Sweet...

I'm going to get 1GB of RAM for the laptop because of this, though since the virtual machine only gets 192MB RAM as it is for the moment. It makes it slightly sluggish in my opinion...

I think I'll do a clean install when I know everything I need is working in Ubuntu just to make sure I don't have to install Windows again in a month or so.

And everything goes horribly wrong...

So, the moment I step out from Brussels train station from the Eurostar one of my bags gets stolen... With my passport and Eurostar tickets... Isn't it typical?

Anyway... The meetings went ahead anyway. I contacted the Swedish embassy which offered to get me a temporary passpor for €121. This was not interesting to me since I would have to get a new one anyway back in England for the same amount of money.

The Eurostar police service on the other hand didn't think I needed one. Just a police report and (thank goodness) my driver's license was enough to get me back home.

Trip to Belgium

Sweet! I was asked by my job to go to Bruges (Belgium) tomorrow... First time on Eurostar and first time in Belgium. And it's all paid as well... I don't know if it can be much better than this?

Linux / Ubuntu experimentation

Finally took the time to install Linux (or more specifically Ubuntu 6.06) on my laptop.

It's interesting experimenting with these kinds of things and it's always fun to learn something new.

The laptop seems to work fine with Ubuntu, though... I've heard so many horror-stories about hardware compatibility and especially regarding wi-fi...

Well, I'm happy to report that everything 'important' is working fine.