When Srinivas told me that UBUNTU was becoming one of he most preffered flavors of LINUX i did not believe in his words. After a bit of pondering and browsing around i finally thought let me give it a shot. I downloaded the 700 mb installer. Ubuntu's latest flavor 8.x has some cool features which really are helpful for a Windows lover (Read Unix illiterate) like me.
My Sunday morning started of with writing the *.iso file into a CD. Be sure you do this at a slow speed because I wrote it at maximum speed on a "NOT" so good cd and the installer failed!!.
You can install this version of UBUNTU like you would do any other software like MSOFFICE. No need of formatting or making a new partition...When you reboot your PC you will get an option of using ubuntu. Aint that cool....you cant do that even with windows ;-).
However, if you thought that my life was all rosy...beware!!..Life is never rosy...I figured out that i could not get the needed resolution on my wide screen monitor. Infact, i also realized that i had to download the NVIDIA dirvers to make this thing really usable. I am no LINUX geek, i just wanted to own a decent OS :-(. However, I did not give up and started of by downloading the NVIDIA drivers from their website. However, a lot of command lines are needed to run it and there are a few things that is needed to get it running. I stuggled with various things try to first get the resolution right thinking that i will install the drivers later...BIG mistake...Get the driver installed first then do the rest. You will have to configure the Router before you can connect to the net. I made a list of things that i would need to look up and downloaded the pages from my windows partition and then used them as a guide to get my Ubuntu talk to external world via the router.
The NVIDIA drivers need to be compiled for the UBUNTU kernal, hence you will have to use the Synaptic Manager to download Libc libraries. Stop the Xserver by using
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
run the executable that you have via
sudo sh DriverName.run
then restart it using startx or /etc/init.d/gdm start
and then you should be done.
You will also get all the missing resolution and speed that you were looking for...
And trust me it was a moment of Triumph for me as i loved the graphics and the clarity. It was really worth the effort...One step towards making friends with TUX.
2 comments:
Ah - so you took the dip. You could have waited another week and they had a stable release out - Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). I think the version you installed currently was Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).
Now coming to nVidia drivers, I remember doing the same process for my laptop on the 7.10 (or previous - I cant remember). But after that, I removed they drivers I installed by hand, and used the ones packaged along with Ubuntu.
You see - these drivers are proprieatary drivers and hence, are not enabled by default. Just go to System > Administration > Hardware drivers, enable nVidia (you might need internet connection if it needs to download something), and it should be a breeze from there.
I read about the new version on the UBUNTU site but just wanted to give this a shot (Since I had the time and the interest [ I generally have either one or neither both!!]). I had issues using the drivers bundled with UBUNTU because of the 19 inch widescreen that i have. :-(
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