Another useful Ubuntu Blog and some samba help

I was trying to set up Ubuntu on my Dell Laptop (Btw, Gutsy doesnt work, and Feisty works out of the box). And as they say, it worked like a charm.

So, trying to configure samba sharing between my two laptops, I ran into some issues and was looking on google. Found this blog really helping http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/

A few simple mistake though, setting up a samba share for the first time requires using

smbpasswd -a

so that the user can be created for samba.

It was giving me this message

Could not connect to machine 127.0.0.1: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE
Failed to change password for raghav

and then, my windows workgroup name in smb.conf was not good either. So, changed that, and restarted the daemon using

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

and all’s well in the samba world

I have also managed to set up the ssh server as well, so I can now work on rails stuff, without having to reboot the system. Its really pretty simple in Ubuntu. Just install the sshd package from Synaptics and you are good.

Now get some ssh client (like putty) and just remote connect to the in-house ubuntu server (sounds pretty impressive..huh..) and u r started.

Gutsy on Dell Inspiron 5100

As planned, I was doing a bit of research on installing latest Ubuntu release on my Dell Inspiron 5100.

I had installed Feisty Fawn on the same laptop earlier without any issues. As it turns out, there are a lot of issues with Gutsy on Dell Inspiron 5100.

Some of the major issues..

1. Display
2. Heat Sink management (from software)
3. Live CD booting

Here is one of the that point towards such problems…

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=580134

When I tried to boot through the Live CD (downloaded today), I was greeted with a blank screen. Could only get in when I chose the safe graphics mode from the boot menu.

I am surprised at this situation, especially at the fact that a give set of hardware was supported by default in Feisty Fawn and not in the next release (Gutsy). There got to be something in the release planning that needs strong attention…

About my Dell laptop

I have a Dell Inspiron 5100 purchased in July 2003. It has worked pretty well duing these years. Lately, say last one year or so, I have had problems with it. The performance went down considerabley.

Taking cues from here and there, I went for memory upgrade and put on a 1 GB RAM chip. It did help but not as much as I would have liked.

then in July 2007 we went in our new laptop HP Compaq 6710b. Its working nice and fine, no problems.

Now, I do have this Dell laptop at home and want to put this to some good use. Selling it doesnt seem like very good idea,

a. because its not going to fetch any interesting money
b. its got a bit of emotional value for me (it was my first ever laptop)
c. I can always use a second system at home for experiments etc.

Last few months, I have tried to do a bit more research into getting this system to work better. The people around the place have suggested to do a BIOS upgrade. When I tried for the first time, it turned out that I had a really really old BIOS on this laptop and it wont be upgraded directly.

I had A06 and the current version was A32. So, I was forced to upgrade to A22 first and then only I could goto A31. I read about it on Dell Forums and have to thank dallascowboysworldchamps for the suggestion to the way forward.

A gentleman on one of the google groups (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sys.pc-clone.dell) suggested that I should install a software for monitoring my cpu fan. Available at http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/ this software seems to work.

It reports that my CPU temperature is fluctuating between 57 and 62 degree celcius and its regulating fan speed according to the temperature.

Overall, the system is performing much better already.

Lets see what comes next. I am thinking of installing Ubuntu on this laptop once again…