Feisty vs Dapper

[Rehan Afzal]

Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:    Hi,

On Sat, 06 Oct 2007, Rehan Afzal wrote:

> I have a Dell D531 Laptop, AMD Turion 64 2.1GHz with 2 GB RAM.
> It has an ATI Radeon X1270 Graphics Card.

Looking at this guy's report of this laptop, it seems the video card and
wifi are a little problematic. However, he seems to be saying that it
works with gutsy. 
   
  No I haven't tried Gutsy !
   
   
  Gutsy is not finished yet, but it is in beta, so it
might be worth a try and is due for release in the next few weeks.

http://blog.1407.org/2007/09/12/dell-d531/

These issues with ATI cards are common to all linux distributions and are
down to ATI not publishing specs of their cards. This situation has
changed in the past couple of months, so it should improve fairly radically
in the next year or so.

> I can't get the resolution to the native 1200 X 800.
> Every time I restart gdm after configuring xorg it hangs.

A few questions:

- are you using the ati proprietary video driver? 
   
  Actually no I can't find the actual drivers and I am just following what the setup installs.
   
   It's possible you might
need to use it in order to get the full capabilities of some ATI cards
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI
   
  Let Me Try this and report back ! Thanks for the link. 
  
- when you say it hangs, what error does it give? If you misconfigure
Xorg or ask it to do something it can't, it won't start.
   
  Well the screen goes black and you get all kind of strange symbols on the screen. If you press Ctl-Alt-Del the symbols start to increase and then it just freezes.

> If you were to shut down improperly, Ubuntu won't start !
> I have had to install it thrice !

Can you give some more information. At what point does the boot fail? Did
you try the rescue boot option? Presumably by "shut down improperly" you
mean you just powered it off?
   
  Yes, I meant power off ! Well yes I tried to rescue but to no avail. I tried fsck but nothing.

> The wireless network card has to be configured every time after restart
> as it wouldn't connect to the Access Point. 

What type of network card is it? Are you using NDISWrapper or a native
driver? According to the blog entry it's a bcm43xx but there are lots of
those. Again gutsy is likely to be quite a bit better with this as the
bcm43xx drivers are in very active development. I have a broadcom card
myself and have had to use a development kernel to get it working right.
If yours is an AirForce One card and you feel brave, I've documented it
here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/Broadcom_BCM4318_%5BAirForce_One_54g%5D_(Native_Driver)

Alternatively, the NDISWrapper way might be easier

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/Broadcom_BCM4318_%5BAirForce_One_54g%5D

  Yes I am using NDiswrapper and I have configured it on three other machines. And I not using bcm43xx as we actually blacklist it. There is a nice HowTo for installingh the Dell Wireless cards and I have used that to install a couple of other Linksys cards. But the Dell Hangs. :) 

  Rehan 


-- 
edubuntu-users mailing list
edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users



       
---------------------------------
Looking for a deal? Find great prices on flights and hotels with Yahoo! FareChase.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/attachments/20071007/ff737c88/attachment.htm