[ubuntu-us-in] Unity/ubuntu

[Simón Ruiz]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Keith Karnafel <kkarnafel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was at first resistant to Unity but it grew on me. Works great with my
> netbooks as well as my desktop using 46in HD screen. I'm surprised to here
> it doesn't work on a lot of older hardware. It has on mine... from some
> really old Sony's, Dell and HP. It was actually first time I didn't have to
> screw with older Wi-Fi cards to get them to work.  Brought an old HP laptop
> back from the dead and actually quite snappy. Also first time I got
> hidemyass vpn to work out of the box without any errors. Anyway my two
> cents. Keith

I've gotten it to run on our old Dell Optiplex 280s, and other than
having to use Unity 2D, it's pretty snappy even on 512MB of RAM.

I've only had problems with the one laptop model, here: Dell Latitude
D610. Unfortunately, that's the model we use for our software install
lab. And yeah, I was pretty surprised as well.

It seems like it might be related to the Broadcom wireless card. At
least that's the last message I get before it hangs. Which is
interesting; I think the wireless card situation got better on that
model the last couple releases only to suddenly make it hang on boot
this past one.

We'll probably just use last release's installer.

I might try booting up the live USB from another machine, and running
the driver installer over there so that it's got it in the live
environment, then see if the laptop will boot from that live USB.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that won't affect which packages get
installed, so my guess is it might hang on boot after rebooting from
the install process, which kinda defeats the purpose.

I'm pretty sure I could get things working myself, probably via live
environments and chrooting, etc. but walking a classroom through the
process is certainly beyond the scope of a short Intro to Computers
class.

Simón