For quite sometime, I was planning to install Ubuntu on my dell laptop Vostro 1500 currently with Window XP but busy schedule wasn't allowing me. Two days back finally I downloaded Ubuntu hardy(8.04) from ubuntu website, burnt iso using Infrarecorder.Installation was pretty easy. Ubuntu provide option of partitioning HD in three ways, new users can opt for guided one while more serious users can try customize partitioning.
Entire process took around 35-40 minutes and my laptop was ready to dual boot. Personally I don't like orange brown default theme but there was numerous customization options available to change how you want to make your ubuntu look. Look and feel was last thing to worry. First thing after installation was to make wireless network setup work. It wasn't as simple as I thought.
Most wireless cards including broadcom ones don't provide linux drivers thus ndiswrapper package is needed to use windows wireless driver. Ndiswrapper requires pretty straight installation but nothing worked even after installation. I spend next four hours trying various options to make it work. but all vain. At 1:30 AM I finally decided to give it break for the day.
Next day I started all again but this time I was lucky and found out firmware for my wireless card is not available thus should be extracted out of windows drivers.
Finally managed to find script for same, viola it worked. Now I was in position to give serious thoughts to make ubuntu my default OS. Frankly ubuntu beats window hands down when It comes to speed and other customization options.Also, able to tweak your OS the way you want and every process running is so transparent that gives you a feeling of familiarity. You know what's going on your PC unlike windows where every thing looks like a black box.
Everything was pretty exciting so far. but here comes the twist in the tale.
I noticed my CPU fans running very fast, checked top was surprised to find dual core cpu was running 100% busy. What the heck, I am not even running anything CPU heavy. Found process eating up CPU cycle was "gnome- appearance". Googled a bit and here it was, I am running Nvidia GE force with 8400M display card and buggy driver ported with it, is incapable of doing required rendering in linux thus CPU ends up taking all the load for display.
Bad, bad real bad...., read somewhere nvidia has fixed the issue but fix is not available in public domain to use.
So my ubuntu dream has hit big roadblock, probably need to explore fedora.
But on the other hand I learnt so many new things in the process and that's what matters in the end. Isn't it?
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