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.

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…

Laptop motherboard replaced.. thanks HP

HP website’s support ticket management can be improved.

After I made the ticket for reporting the problem, 3 days later I received a packet with a CPU fan in there. Looks like somebody at HP thought that I could open my notebook and replace the fan myself…

However, it took few more days for them to acknowledge the real problem. Then they picked up the laptop and returned it after 9 days with a replaced motherboard.

I am happy to say that the exhaust fan now works without the special sound it was creating earlier.

I feel happy that I purchased the HP Care pack..

First Problems with 6710b

In November I encountered for the first time something I would call a “problem”. The exhaust fan just wont stop whirring… and that too at a pretty high volume.

As a result I had to start looking for stuff on net..about others having similar issues… As it turned out, a lot of other people were having the same problems.

In the meantime, HP has acknowledged the problem and starting fixing the issue by replacing the motherboard in the laptop with a new one (apparantly at no cost to customer, but I cant guarantee that since I have a 4 year hp care pack).

So, now a days, my notebook is with HP for the motherboard replacement.

Read here more about the famous “noisy fan” problem with 6510b/6710b notebooks from HP.

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..

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation on my HP 6710b

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I have had a tough time getting Ubuntu to install on my HP 6710b. Here I try to list the various sources I referred to, and steps I did to get it working …

I must mention, most of my experience was guided from this page, Unfortunately, it did not work exactly for me, so I thought the need to write my experience.

Other posts which contributed to my knowledge/experience are

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=488332
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=452697
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=421588
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494601

I thank all the contributors to these posts, since I believe the collective knowledge was what enabled me to finally achieve this installation successfully at the end. Thanks guys

1. Download and burn the alternate CD for Feisty. The Live CD does not work, and thus breaks the promise of “works out of the box” for this model.
2. While you boot your system with the alternate CD, enter some extra boot parameters
1. Press F6 to get to the options screen
2. In the starting enter break=top
3. Towards the end of the boot parameters, enter irqpoll, acpi=off noacpi pnpbios=off
   
3. After this, your system should boot normally.
4. Now, the text based installer (remember its the alternate CD not Live CD), will install the OS onto your system. However, when it comes to installing/configuring x server, the system bump you to a command prompt.
5. At this point, I ran the following (after making sure that I have the network connectivity – at this point ethernet already works)
1. sudo apt-get update
2. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
3. sudo echo piix >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
4. sudo update-initramfs -u
6. At this point Reboot your system. Since Grub is already installed, you should normally see a boot menu. Choose Ubuntu from there. DO NOT choose Windows for any reason whatsoever.
7. After reboot, you have a working Ubuntu system minus X server. Log in as usual, in the text mode.
8. Perform this sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
9. Now, take backup of your xorg.conf using
1. sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bkp
10. Launch the reconfigure command for xserver configuration using sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
11. And, then take the pain of configuring everything manually.. not automatically. Among, the following steps, I am not sure about the sequence of some.. but more or less, gives you an idea of what comes across..
1. Be careful, not all options work good with default values, though most of them do.
2. Do not choose to do an auto-detect for your screen. NO.
3. Choose manually everything that you can for your screen. It asks you for a level of configuration that you want to do, and gives options like Simple, Intermediate, Advanced… there choose Simple.
4. Choose a screen size (15″ I think)
5. Choose Resolution.. Careful to choose the widescreen resolutions
6. Decide on memory to be allocated. I chose 256MB
7. Choose color Depth : I chose 24 bit
8. Towards the end, it would ask you to write the configuration to disk, obviously choose yes.
9. it would exit without trying to start x.
12. Now, just type at command line, startx, should work.
13. Once you are in x session, install the driver suggested at intel X3100 Drivers post , Do the configuration as suggested in the post. It works.
14. The X server configuration is done now, the system can be rebooted, and would automatically go into x mode.
15. Lest I forget, Go to the Grub menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) and update the windows vista boot point description. Both normal boot point and recovery boot point have same label by default. If you boot into recovery mode by mistake, the MBR is overwritten….

I can only hope that others would be benefitted by this experience. Unfortunately I did not keep on the fly notes for the whole process, So, quite a bit of this is based on my recollection.

hth
regards
raghav..

Finally.. ubuntu runs on HP 6710b

Hey, it works…

After a weekend of tweaks and attempts, I managed to install Ubuntu on my new HP 6710b.

Its now working like a charm, but only after consuming a full weekend of troubleshooting… It did not work out of the box.. as I originally expected.

The graphics card was something neither Ubuntu, nor Fedora could handle out of the box. So, I had to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn using their alternate CD (NOT live CD). And, then spend time configuring various things..including :

• S-ATA hard disk
• Intel X3100 graphics controller
• …

I intend to post the complete process in detail.. sometime soon.. on this blog itself.

Bear with me till then.

cheers,
raghav..

Surprise of my life

Well.. this one has to be the one…

I bought HP 6710b notebook with a vision of working with Vista and Ubuntu towards my own skill development.

However, when I got the delivery of the notebook, I was probably the happier guy around. This changed soon , with my discovery that this notebook’s hardware is newer than the Feisty Fawn distribution. And therefore there have to be tweaks and what not to basically get it working. That too, under loads of restrictions. You cant run Beryl or compiz on this yet. Because, yeah, you thought it right, there are no graphic accelerator drivers for this chipset.

While I am happy on one hand that I have got a really cutting edge technology notebook, I am equally pissed off that the things that I wanted to do with my new notebook cant be started off as I would have wanted….

I am still struggling with installation fo Ubuntu … thanks to the ubuntu forums, there are some threads which share experiences and solutions .. I am yet to try that out… perhaps tomorrow…

will update..

Linux Installation on HP 6710b

HP Laptops dont work with Linux…

I should have known that…

I spent big money on buying this one… 6710b… loads of my savings went into it.. and now it doesnt run Ubuntu/Fedora…

Tried looking at ubuntu forums… and found nothing that works.
Tried a few things, suggestions from some people, that claim it worked for them, but, somehow it didnt work out.

When Vista booted for the first time after my “not so successful attempt”, it wiped out the MBR and then the Grub boot menu was gone.

Here are some links I tried…

1. http://www.blaise.ca/blog/?p=14
   
2. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p…P+Compaq+6710b
3. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=488332

But… nothing moved on..

I am now planning to go through the whole things once again… may be I missed something.. but would sure post stuff here…

cheers
raghav..

The First look at my HP 6710b

Hey…. Finally it arrived… My HP Compaq 6710b, not that I had to wait long, but I am an anxious man, and the wait was already too much when I knew that it has been delivered home but I couldn’t see it before I finished office on Friday.

Its really the latest technology stuff..

• Intel Core 2 Duo, 4MB L2 Cache and 800 Mhz FSB
• 2 GHz Processor
• 2 GB RAM : Max 4GB
• 15.4″ Widescreen
• Gigabit LAN, Bluetooth, All that stuff…
• Windows Vista Business Pre-Installed

The first reaction after startup was, “Vista takes whole lot of time in initial setup. Quite a few reboots, and lots of time”. However, when it showed up, the GUI looked familiar… to a Mac I have seen with a friend.

When I was reading the initial reviews about Vista that MS has tried to imitate the GUI of Mac, I didn’t really believe that was true, but then when I saw it, I had to say that the critics were right. The Vista interface is much like Mac and various other features are matching to Linux distributions.. e.g. Ubuntu…

One of the biggest problems I faced was with Networking. I had to network this system with my old Dell running Win-XP home SP2 and my external Hard disk, which I intend to share between the two systems.

It was an unbelievably complex task, I had to say, much to my disappointment. Well, I have one router, two laptops, how much more simple home network can get. I expected it to automatically find that out and suggest me that it would put them into some network.

It did not, and I had to spend hours to find out what to do.. So many reboots, stuff like that.

Eventually it worked, but intermittently, sometimes I could see the other system and access things, other times, it was plain simple impossible to get through. Its wierd.. I can imagine why people say with mac and linux (ubuntu), “It just works”, because Windows doesn’t seem to…

As an example, One fine moment my system decides not to see the other laptop, then I have to open a command prompt, do a

ping -a

to the other system (my older Dell), and then the two systems can talk to each other just fine…

Very Wierd…

Well, my next problem was (and still is) trying to partition my huge hard disk. I’ve got 160GB there, out of which some was already taken up during Vista installation, but I need to partition my hdd to organize it better. Simple.

But, But, there doesn’t seem to be a single program available in market which allows partition management for Vista. I tried partition magic.. but it doen’t work with Vista. Great. and they dont have a Vista compatible version yet.

I cant go ahead and install my application software (e.g. Oracle server, other tools) in C drive as such, especially since its a 100+ GB partition and the only partition in system.

I tried the “shrink” option from Vista, but it doesn’t allow me partitions with space limits that I like. For some “God knows why” kind of reason, shrinking doesnt allow the boot partition to be smaller than 80 GB.. I dont want to waste that much of my HDD space on boot partition…

I dont know when can I get that done… may be when I try to install Ubuntu, I do some more partitioning than required for Ubuntu only…

will keep posting…

cheers
raghav..