Improved Gutsy for 6710b

Going through a few Ubuntu forums, it turned out that many of the initial glitches around Gutsy installation for HP6710b have been removed.

My installation was originally an upgrade from Feisty, a very troubled and hacked one at that. So, I thought why not try to give it a clean shot and get a fresh copy of Gutsy installed on my laptop.

I dared and I like the results already. Few features -

• The system is a lot faster than it was before
• The graphics quality in general a lot better
• The fonts looks much better (though the settings are same)
• After installing xserver-xgl package, the Visual effects work

Though I had to spend some time to configure a few things again from scratch, it looks and works like a much better system than it used to.

After my fresh installation, I had initial trouble with installing rails. There this page helped. Though it talks about installation on FreeBsd, it worked perfectly on my Gutsy.

Then I had some trouble with initial password of root user on MySQL. For some reason, after the initial installation, I could not go in mysql environment through any means at all. Then again, googling and ubuntu forums helped out. This page helped me through that.

Finally, when I was installing Eclipse to be able to work faster/better with rails, I came across the fact that the standard Eclipse package from Ubuntu, does not come with any java runtime environment. I tried downloading and using Sun Java but that didnt turn out very well.

Later I found that Synaptics has a cunning little feature. On a right click on a package name, there is a option for “Mark Recommended For Installation”. Once I clicked on that, it selected about 15 more packages and this time managed to get all the required stuff for Java as well.

Surprised as I was at the intuitiveness of the package management system, I felt it should hae done the same to start with. Anyway, its fine now. Took some time, but working great now.

Making the fonts look better on Ubuntu

Hi,

Just found a better way of rendering fonts on Ubuntu..

I was looking for making the fonts look better on my Feisty Fawn. While searching, I hit this – http://jaganath.wordpress.com/2006/07/16/ubuntu-install-log-6-finally-os-x-like-font-rendering-in-linux/

The following page suggests some tips/packages to be installed for better rendering.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1041769&postcount=1

However, I must warn that, after installing the attached files, the system will be BROKEN. Not because what he is suggesting is incorrect in any way, rather just because in Feisty fawn the same packages are

1. available in the repositories
2. available in newer versions.

And therefore, I would suggest installing the packages from the standard Feisty repository. Following commands can be useful -

sudo apt-get install libcairo2 libcairo2-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libxft2

And, lest I forget to mention, run the following command…

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

Hope that its useful. AND, I must say, the suggestion for the fonts settings work excellently.. absolutely great.

have fun
raghav..