Dual-Booting Ubuntu and WinXP on my laptop

I may have to do some travelling soon, so I wanted to get Ubuntu on my laptop. Not only would this reduce my time having to mess about in Windows, but it was would be a good chance to learn some new things about Ubuntu.

Hardware

The laptop itself is a Sony Vaio VGN-AX580G, which has been a pretty decent machine for me. I also want to be able to use my Linksys WPC300N wireless card and my Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer for Bluetooth

As is my custom, I didn’t bother reading anything about hardware compatibility before upgrading – but I actually did back-up my important files, just in case!

The laptop has 2 logical 80GB drives, so my plan was to leave WinXP on the first drive, and clean up the second drive and give it to Ubuntu. This seemed like the simplest and safest plan.

I torrented the i386 Hardy CD, and had this simple guide from Softpedia open to help me. There’s really nothing to report, because the installation went absolutely flawless…the only thing that you even had to think about was making sure you picked the correct drive to install Ubuntu on.

Now, when the machine is re-booted, GRUB pops up with a menu to select which OS you want to load. Very simple.

After the install, the touchpad worked. I noticed straight away 3 things I would need to fix: the Bluetooth mouse, the wireless card, and Compiz Fusion.

Bluetooth Mouse

Although this was my first interaction with Bluetooth in Ubuntu, this was very simple. The Bluetooth icon was up in gnome-panel already, so all I had to do was right-click on it, go to Preferences > Services, click on “Input Service” and then add the mouse there in the “Input Devices” section.

I did spend a bit of time figuring this out for the first time – I messed about with the “Browse Device…” option, and didn’t realize that I needed to click on “Input service” until I read about it on some web page.

So, this was one of those things where if you know what to do it’s quite simple, but if you are absolutely new to it, I don’t think you will stumble on the right thing. A “wizard” would have been welcome.

Wireless Card

Sigh. Wireless is still not as smooth as I would like. I doodled about with network manager a bit and could not connect.

I recalled a proggy called WiFi Radar that I had used before when setting up my wife’s machine. I installed this, and sure enough I saw my home wireless network! Hooray, right?

Well, it was strange, because even though I could see the network (and my neighbor’s), I could not connect to it! Frustrating!

Finally, I changed my wireless router from “N-Only” to “Mixed”. This did the trick, and I was able to connect. So, apparently whatever is supporting my card does not support 802.11n?

Compiz Fusion

I already sort of expected this problem, because the laptop has ATI graphics, and I had read that for whatever reason, some/many/all (?) laptop ATI graphic chips were disabled from using Compiz by default.

There are a ton of places to find out the details, but the upshot is I edited /usr/bin/compiz, and added two lines at the top:

LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT="true"

SKIP_CHECKS="yes"

Not every person said that first line was necessary, but it seems to be working fine for me with both of them, so that’s what I’m using.

I rounded out the Compiz situation by installing fusion-icon and compizconfig-settings-manager.

I’m ready for my closeup

As part of the process, I thought it might be nice to get my laptop’s built-in camera working. It’s not something I often use, but still…

I heard about cheese, which is new for Hardy I think, so I installed that. A video from my camera popped right up! Strangely, it was upside-down! Since cheese has a flip effect, this doesn’t seem to be a big deal, but it was a bit wierd.

Still, taking a photo and recording a video seemed easy as pie!

Other stuff

There are a few things I haven’t checked into yet, like the fingerprint reader, sleep/hibernate and the related stuff, but I couldn’t be happier on just how easy it was to set this thing up!