Understanding Ubuntu, part 2
Well, after spending pretty much the entire evening struggling with it, I think I've got Ubuntu nicely configured. The first order of business was to restore the wireless drivers -- that was fairly easy. Just reinstalling the package I accidentally uninstalled last night, and then reconfiguring the drivers as I had the first time around addressed that issue. Next was figuring out the video drivers.
It took a bunch of searching, but I had a rather wonderful facepalm moment when googling brought me to ThinkWiki, a wiki devoted to ThinkPads. I had been to it before briefly a long time ago, but had totally forgotten about it. Naturally, the site had a complete and thorough overview of how to set up a T61 with Ubuntu. So! I went and got 'Envy', which is a program that more or less fetches the latest builds of the nVidia drivers and then compiles them on-the-fly so you have the most 'perfect' configuration for your system. Envy did its thing, I rebooted, and bam -- the drivers worked. At 640x480.
Fortunately, it was just a matter of fiddling with the xorg.conf file so as to provide it with proper display resolution values, and then the nvidia driver clued in and picked up the rest of the slack from there.
But I noticed I hadn't heard one peep out of Ubuntu this whole time. Hrm...sound appeared to not be working. I paid a visit to Apple.com/trailers to verify, and sure enough -- not a sound to be heard. Back to ThinkWiki, which revealed a rather complex process involving manually building the ALSA audio drivers, and then manually editing the source code for ThinkPad-specific bug fixes. I looked around in vain for a way to avoid doing that, but I decided that I may as well learn it now.
It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. I needed to install several additional tools, but they were nicely available in the Synaptic Package Manager, so that was a breeze. The edits only needed to be made in a text editor, so no problem there, and then it was off to the compiler. A few minutes and a reboot later...and the sound instantly worked.
I downloaded/customized Firefox so that it's more or less identical to my typical Windows configuration for it (with some timely assistance from Cody, providing all the source information as I entered it into the downloaded extensions and such). Then, downloaded XChat so I could get on IRC. Downloaded a few other plugins (Flash, namely, so as to get access to YouTube), and then spent the rest of the evening just reading up on various topics.
Oh, side note. I wanted to import my old bookmarks from Firefox. I knew the bookmarks to be stored in a basic HTML file, so my thinking was to e-mail this to myself. But then I decided to get crazy and try to access it via the network.
I have never, ever had an easier time accessing another computer remotely. It was astonishing. And these machines aren't even on the same OS! Yet immediately, Ubuntu recognized the 'Empire' workgroup that my other two machines are on (laptop and PC), and I could access the laptop instantly using my Windows credentials. From there, it was just a matter of copying the bookmark file across the network and having Firefox import it. Obscenely easy.
So far, I'm really, really pleased. Considering this is a completely new operating system for me, a two day set-up time is quite remarkable, especially considering how easy it's been to find information on-line, and how straight-forward all of it ends up being (once you get your head in the right 'space' to understand it).
Linux is definitely a different world from Windows...but I think I like it.
It took a bunch of searching, but I had a rather wonderful facepalm moment when googling brought me to ThinkWiki, a wiki devoted to ThinkPads. I had been to it before briefly a long time ago, but had totally forgotten about it. Naturally, the site had a complete and thorough overview of how to set up a T61 with Ubuntu. So! I went and got 'Envy', which is a program that more or less fetches the latest builds of the nVidia drivers and then compiles them on-the-fly so you have the most 'perfect' configuration for your system. Envy did its thing, I rebooted, and bam -- the drivers worked. At 640x480.
Fortunately, it was just a matter of fiddling with the xorg.conf file so as to provide it with proper display resolution values, and then the nvidia driver clued in and picked up the rest of the slack from there.
But I noticed I hadn't heard one peep out of Ubuntu this whole time. Hrm...sound appeared to not be working. I paid a visit to Apple.com/trailers to verify, and sure enough -- not a sound to be heard. Back to ThinkWiki, which revealed a rather complex process involving manually building the ALSA audio drivers, and then manually editing the source code for ThinkPad-specific bug fixes. I looked around in vain for a way to avoid doing that, but I decided that I may as well learn it now.
It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. I needed to install several additional tools, but they were nicely available in the Synaptic Package Manager, so that was a breeze. The edits only needed to be made in a text editor, so no problem there, and then it was off to the compiler. A few minutes and a reboot later...and the sound instantly worked.
I downloaded/customized Firefox so that it's more or less identical to my typical Windows configuration for it (with some timely assistance from Cody, providing all the source information as I entered it into the downloaded extensions and such). Then, downloaded XChat so I could get on IRC. Downloaded a few other plugins (Flash, namely, so as to get access to YouTube), and then spent the rest of the evening just reading up on various topics.
Oh, side note. I wanted to import my old bookmarks from Firefox. I knew the bookmarks to be stored in a basic HTML file, so my thinking was to e-mail this to myself. But then I decided to get crazy and try to access it via the network.
I have never, ever had an easier time accessing another computer remotely. It was astonishing. And these machines aren't even on the same OS! Yet immediately, Ubuntu recognized the 'Empire' workgroup that my other two machines are on (laptop and PC), and I could access the laptop instantly using my Windows credentials. From there, it was just a matter of copying the bookmark file across the network and having Firefox import it. Obscenely easy.
So far, I'm really, really pleased. Considering this is a completely new operating system for me, a two day set-up time is quite remarkable, especially considering how easy it's been to find information on-line, and how straight-forward all of it ends up being (once you get your head in the right 'space' to understand it).
Linux is definitely a different world from Windows...but I think I like it.