Michael Dolan Dot Com

Sunday, June 25th, 2006

Ubuntu Tips / Findings

1) Forgot about the whole “sudo bash” instead of su… and why don’t they include any console in the menu by default?

2) If you’re using a Broadcom 1450 wireless Mini-PCI card, you will notice that it’s detected as a 143xx card… that’s because they are building support for these cards into kernel modules, but the 1450 still requires that you use ndiswrapper (installed by default in Ubuntu). So, just blacklist the 143xx module and install your Win drivers with ndiswrapper and you’ll be up and running. From a CL, type “sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist” and then add in “blacklist bcm43xx”

3) The Synaptics apt-get implementation is really polished - use it. There are deb packages for just about anything, but you need to enable the non-free “multiverse” and community maintained “universe” by opening Synaptics and choosing Settings->Repositories. On the first LTS binary, click edit and check off the boxes. Now you can see all the packages.

4) I was absolutely blown away that the “up/down volume” multimedia buttons at the top of my laptop actually work out of the box… never have I seen that… never. I had them working once before but that was an odd setup of tpbuttons (prob the same still) but they even added in the On Screen Display with a volume meter. Very impressive.

5) boy do I miss conf.d … other distros could do well to copy Gentoo on this one.

6) XGL - not out of the box. Also uses nv drivers out of the box… argh…. will have to find out how difficult it is to use the nvidia drivers - there seem to be “difficulties”.
7) DVD Playback, MP3 and all those proprietary codecs you want. Yeah so Ubuntu is sticking with the “legal” approach… although this site is probably bordering on inducement (a wonderful new term we all have to fear from the RIAA/MPAA), this page should help you get started. The big one is to replace totem-streamer backend with totem-xine. There’s even a nice little script in Ubuntu for getting decss up and going.
8) OpenOffice 2.0 -> not sure why but this Ubuntu release is quite possibly the slowest loading OOo that I’ve ever come across.

If I find any more.. I’ll add them - and if you have any suggestions, just send me a note/comment.