Gutsy on my laptop
October 23rd, 2007
My laptop (specs) has generally done quite well with fresh Ubuntu installs, but I have never been able to complete an upgrade easily or with everything working…until now. I started out with 5.04 (Hoary) and have tried to do an OS upgrade for each release since, and have generally ended up doing a fresh install (thankfully, I’ve always used a separate partition for /home, so this wasn’t really a big deal). The problems could have been caused by my incompetence, but I can’t prove or disprove that.
However, today I successfully upgraded from 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gutsy) using the Update Manager. Woo hoo!
What did I do differently? Almost nothing. I was extra careful to remove absolutely everything that I had installed from anywhere other than the official Ubuntu repos, and I switched from the restricted fglrx driver for my video card to the open ATI driver. That was all. Then I pulled the trigger and waited. The whole thing took about 2 1/2 to 3 hours and I’m up and running and happy.
When I did the final reboot, my desktop came up and offered to install the restricted fglrx driver for me as well as a restricted driver for the internal modem, which I have never even attempted to use on this laptop. Cool! I did so, and everything went swimmingly.
Thank you, developers! I’m off to play.
Entry Filed under: Linux / Ubuntu
14 Comments Add your own
1. Mike | October 23rd, 2007 at 11:20 am
I have a ThinkPad T42 and I did a clean install of 7.10 in dual boot mode (for the moment) and everything including the hibernate button worked out of the box.
The only tweaking I have done is to get a Sprint broadband card working. Using the GNOME PPP, it does not work. Using KPP, it works quite easily. Could not be happier.
Windows will be disappearing soon.
2. Marius Gedminas | October 23rd, 2007 at 11:42 am
Does suspend work for you? Because Ubuntu 7.10 release notes mention, that suspend is broken when you use the ATI restricted driver, but should work fine when you use the open driver. Also, I heard today on the ubuntu mailing list that you also don’t get desktop effects with the current version of the restricted driver.
3. jeremy | October 23rd, 2007 at 12:23 pm
you have the opposite problem of me. It seems that most times I try a fresh install it seems to screw up. I normally have sucess with 6.10 and upgrade my way through the rest. I end up removing a lot of obsolete packages at the end. But I would rather deal with that then have windows. a little Wine with my ubuntu and I don’t need the Windows.
4. matthew | October 23rd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Marius, I just tested it. Suspend does not work for me. I had a good crash. It seemed to go down fine, but it wouldn’t recover from suspend and I had to do a hard power-off, followed by a fsck to deal with scattered inode problems. LOL. Well, now I know. Also, you won’t get the desktop effects using the restricted driver, at least not until the next version that is supposed to support aiglx. Under Feisty I was able to get them up and running using xgl, but that’s not an ideal solution as xgl is a bit buggy.
5. Vadim P. | October 23rd, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Great stuff. Could you post your review on ubuntuhcl.org? It would be really nice to have one unitified place for everything.
6. seb | October 23rd, 2007 at 1:35 pm
does suspend/hibernate work? not for me… bummer. try again next year
7. matthew | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Vadim: You are welcome to copy the info from or link to this page that I made originally for Linux on Laptops. I’m afraid I don’t have the energy or the will to post my info in yet another place…it’s been on the Ubuntu Wiki, and several other places in the past and I just couldn’t keep up with the requests. Now, I give a link to that page and the permission to copy the info, along with a smile and a hope that there’s no hard feelings.
8. Vadim P. | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:32 pm
There you go then - ubuntuhcl.org/pub/reviews…
Want to link to that site at the bottom of your page also?
9. matthew | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Vadim: done.
10. Andy | October 24th, 2007 at 9:55 am
I did a clean install on my laptop using the alternative CD because I wanted to try out th full disk encryption (all my important stuff lives in an svn repository somewhere). It is pretty neat - at bootup it asks for a password, and then I’ve set it to auto-login, so it goes straight to the destkop (though it wants me to enter the password for my keyring next, which I thought you could turn off… but I suspect that that is incompatible with autologin or something).
Now if anyone pinches my laptop they don’t get anything
But I also did my first successful upgrade on my desktop. I’ve always avoided them because it is quicker to download the torrent of the CD and install from that. This is the first time I’d noticed (or you’ve been able to) upgrade from a CD (the alternate one) so I gave that a shot.
11. matthew | October 24th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Andy: I was seriously considering doing a fresh install just to play with the full-hard drive encryption. I’ve done this before on a different computer (using a much more detailed and difficult method). I just didn’t feel like I had time right now to reinstall all my data. Next time, though…
12. Lynoure Braakman | October 27th, 2007 at 3:54 am
Neither suspend (does not resume) nor hibernate (hangs) works for me. HP NC8230, ATI Radeon Mobility X600 with open source drivers. So it is not only affecting restricted drivers, unfortunately.
13. Jonathan Mergy | January 21st, 2008 at 1:45 pm
IBM Thinkpad T42, fresh install of Gutsy and suspend/hiberate is a mess. If anyone has it working, please post. If not, I will when I get it operational.
14. astrauch1968 | March 12th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Hello,
I just installed a fresh version of ubuntu 7.10 on my ibm thinkpad t42p. Hibernate/Suspend works after the installation, but _not_ if you switch to the restricted driver and also _not_ if you install the latest ati driver as mentioned here: wiki.cchtml.com/index.php…
So I will do more rebooting until I find a solution.
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