Ubuntu on HP nx9030: short feedback

Hello @all,

a friend of mine donated me his old laptop, because he knew I was interested in playing with Linux and laptops. The present is an HP nx9030 with following properties: Pentium Mobile 1,6 GHZ (Centrino), 512 MB RAM, no HDD (he kept it because of data), 32 MB of video-memory (shared), WLAN module + some standard ports. Detailed info can be found here. I took a Live-CD with Ubuntu 9.04 and started the laptop. And it simply worked. Nice... I even could use WLAN without any problems. It ran a bit slow, but I could live with it taking into account that Linux hat to do everything (including SWAP) in RAM.

So, my conclusion: if you need an ordinary "working horse" for office tasks (writing/reading mails, typing documents, Internet surfing), than you may take nx9030 without any hesitation. It's designed for Windows XP and works fine under Linux Ubuntu - even without HDD.

I personally have Thinkpad T43p, my wife - T23. But I decided to keep that HP laptop for emergency case. If something goes wrong with ours, we will be able to go online and work even in the current (limited) configuration.

Best wishes from Hamburg,
Andrey

ATI graphic card FireGL V 3200 in Debian Linux 6.0 "Squeeze"

Hello @all,

last night I installed new version of Debian - 6.0. I like it in general, but my only problem was my graphic card. My laptop - Thinkpad T43p - has dedicated card from ATI - FireGL V3200. In "Lenny" I used non-free driver from ATI - so-called "fglrx" kernel module and "Catalyst" software. So, my xorg.conf file had "fglrx" in the "Driver" property. After update X-server failed to start. I searched a bit, found out, that I had to recompile "Catalyst" for version 6.0 again. I did it, and then tried to start "aticonfig --initial" to create new xorg.conf file. "aticonfig" ended with "no supported adapters" error. After another 30 minutes of searching I discovered, that the latest version of "Catalyst" (the one, which is shipped with Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", version 10.9) DOES NOT support my card anymore. The last version of "Catalyst" with FireGL-support was version 8.12.

So, to make the story short: some cards are not supported by ATI/AMD in their Linux driver anymore. It means, that we (the owners of those cards) MUST use free driver "radeon", if we want to keep our computers.

So, I plan to post further impressions from "Squeeze" later.

Cheers,
Andrey

Photos of Tashkent / Фотки Ташкента

Photos of Tashkent:

http://setensa.ru/tashkent_may/tashkent_10may.htm

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Фотки Ташкента
http://setensa.ru/tashkent_may/tashkent_10may.htm

A lot of changes in my life...

Hi @all,

a lot of changes happened in my life: new job, new apartment, coming soon baby... I need time to sort all that stuff out... I will try to post more when I get a bit more spare time...

Setting DNS server in Linux

Hello everyone,

recently I replaced my DSL modem with a router. After replacement I noticed, that my Internet connection (Firefox/Thunderbird) became very slowly - I needed more than 10 seconds to open a page. Firefox was showing "Looking up " message all the time.

My first idea was to check the DNS server. In the /etc/resolv.conf file I could see that my router is acting as DNS server:
nameserver 192.168.1.1

I checked options to replace that address with the the DNS servers of my provider (Hansenet/Alice, Germany) and found following solution:
1) copy file /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf into dhclient.conf.original - to make a backup copy of the file;
2) open dhclient.conf with any editor and make following changes:

* uncomment line "prepend domain-name-servers..." and enter there - comma-separated - IP adresses of the desired DNS servers;
* in the line "request subnet-mask,broadcast-address..." remove part "domain-name-servers" - in this way you prevent DHC client from retrieving the DNS name from the router.

After restarting the networking (/etc/init.d/networking restart) and bringing up your interface you must get you Internet connection at normal speed.

Any comments are welcome!

Andrey

P.S. Important to notice, that I DO NOT use resolvconf-package.

Privet iz Tashkenta / Greetings from Tashkent

Vsem privet.

Uje 2 nedeli ya doma, v Tashe. Zdes teplo, suho, mnogo fruktov i koshek. :-) Dela u menya normalno, vse idet po planu... Fotki i kommentarii pozje...

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Hello @all,

greetings from my home city - Tashkent. It's warm here, markets are full with fruits and streets and yards are full with cats. :-) I'm OK, everything goes as planned... Photos and comments later...

I'm flying home soon..

In the mid of October I fly home, to Tashkent, for 4 weeks...