Installing Ubuntu on HP pavilion ze4900 laptop.

A new laptop

My wifes laptop was getting slow and sluggish as of late.  I blame it partly to a years worth of using Windows on it.  As applications are added and/or upgraded, more and more is added to the registry and everywhere else.  Just booting up was a lesson in patience.  She had this laptop for several years and I agree it was getting old, but it used to operate much smoother when we first brought it home.

So, I bought a new laptop for my wife and she’s happy . . . for now.  And what to do with that old laptop?  Well using Windows on that did not sound like fun at all.  I couldn’t even in good faith pass it on to my 9 year old, that would be just mean.  So I loaded Ubuntu.  And I tell you, it runs smoother and looks a heck of alot nicer, IMHO.  I did not do a comparison, but I am convinced that the battery lasts much longer as well.

Installation

If you haven’t installed Ubuntu before, you need not be nervous at doing so.  If you have ever installed Windows, then installing Ubuntu will be like childs play.  Afterwards there may be a some tweaking to do, or perhaps locating things such as drivers and installing them.  However, with Ubuntu, it’s usually quite easy.   I however could not find the proper driver for my WiFi card.  Using the forums, however, was a blessing, for I was able to find the answer to this problem.  I had to install b43-fwcutter to get the correct drivers for my broadcomm WiFi card.

Specs

If you have a HP pavilion ze4900 series, your biggest hurdle will be the wireless drivers, but since you’re reading this, there should be no problem.  Make sure you install it via the Syanaptic Manager.  I tried with the command line once and did not have a working WiFi.  Enjoy.

sudoers

Where’s my SUDO?

Installing different flavors of Linux can be fun and exciting at times.  And it can have you scratching your head.

Take for instance, my first Linux install was Ubuntu.  Of course, this is a nice intro to anyone new to the Linux game, especially with it’s nice graphical interface.  Now when I looked for help on the net, I was directed to use the SUDO command whenever I needed to issue a command requiring Super User abilities.  This was a nice feature and worked as expected.

Now even though Ubuntu is a derivitive of Debian, it is not exactly the same.  It apparently came packaged with SUDO, whereas when I went to install Debian, it did not.  Shortly after my install, I attempted to install or configure certain things, and I was given the response that the SUDO command was not found.  I thought I had broken something.  But alas, all was not lost.

Super User

Of course, what SUDO does is issues the command that follows as if you were logged in as Super User.  Now, I had to install SUDO, but without SUDO.  Easy enough.  Just log in as Super User with the “su” command.  Of course, the password you setup for the super user is necessary.

Once in, no SUDO or anything else is needed to use your godlike skills.  Issue the APTITUDE INSTALL SUDO (or apt-get if you prefer) to install SUDO.  Make sure to exit out of super user when you’re done.

Now that you’ve got SUDO installed, you may still have trouble, this being due to the fact that you are not on the list of privileged users to issue Super User commands at will.  You must add yourself to the /etc/sudoers file.  Oh darn, you can’t do that without SUDO abilities.  Or can you.  Oh yeah, never should have exited out of Super User mode so quickly.  I guess I did tell you to, did I not?  That’s okay, back in, edit the file with your favorite editor and voila, exit out of Super User again.  We’re done now, I promise.

While you’re in the sudoers file, find the line that reads # User privilege specification and copy/paste the line below that reads root    ALL=(ALL) ALL and then change root to your name.  You can add other users this way as well, however the more you add, the more problems you invite.  It’s best to reserve this privilege only to those you trust.

apt-get or aptitude

Installing Software

When you install software for windows, there is many ways to go about that.  You can have a CD-ROM with the program and install directly from that.  You can download a zip file, extract the files and install the extracted program.  You can download an installer that will then download the necessary files off the net.

With Linux, there is also a variety of ways.  One of these is using apt-get or aptitude.  You may have seen on the internet instructions on installing some software within debian or ubuntu where someone gave the command apt-get install <program>.  The alternative is to replace apt-get with aptitude.  What’s the difference?

From the users point of view, there is no difference.  However confirmed reliable sources have brought out the fact that aptitude will handle dependencies much better.

To quote IRONWALKER from the linuxquestions.org forum:

Aptitude is said to deal with dependencies better than apt-get. For example, say you install a package which automatically installs some library packages because it depends on them. When you remove this package with apt-get, it won’t remove the libraries this package installed, although they aren’t used anymore.

When you install that package with aptitude and remove it with aptitude, aptitude ‘detects’ that those library packages aren’t used anymore and will therefore automatically remove them.

To sum up, aptitude will clean things up when you remove a program.  It will also check to make sure no other program needs the files it wants to remove before doing so.

The thing to keep in mind is that if you chose to use one over the other, be consistent.

Graphical Interface

Synaptic Package Manager

For those who are running Gnome desktop interface (or KDE), you can use Synaptic.  This nice program will divide up the available programs into categories for you.  You can even search for whatever type of app you are interested in.

If you prefer to hang out in the CLI, you can issue aptitude by itself on the command line and get this interface.

aptitude package manager

It’s fairly easy and similar to the Synaptic Package Manager.  You can search for applications you’re interested in, you can install packages and uninstall them.  Not only can you navigate using your arrow keys on your keyboard, it also responds to your mouse.  Click on the menu above, or an item to the left to open it up.

This is one sweet app you should familiarize yourself if you like to move around the CLI, especially if you have a system setup without a GUI.

Of course, if you know the name of an application, you can just command line it and not enter the package manager.  For instance, you can just enter sudo aptitude install <filename>.  If you are unsure if an app exists, or perhaps it’s name, use aptitude search <filename>.    AND, as if that’s not enough, if you know just part of the name, enter that in.

The following command yields these results:  aptitude search blend

p   blender                                                     – Very fast and versatile 3D modeller/renderer
p   blender-ogrexml                                  – Blender Exporter for Ogre
p   enblend                                                    – Tool for compositing images
p   kwin-style-blended                             – a window decoration theme for KDE

Surprise

If you do bring up the aptitude package manager and find yourself in need of a little time killer, hit Ctrl-T and then P.

This works on my Debian system, but on my Ubuntu box it drops me back to the command line with the following message: “Ouch!  Got SIGABRT, dying..”   –  Weird.  I’ll have to figure that out another day.

Hard Drive Partitioning with GParted

Partitions?

For those who are uninitiated in partitions, here’s the quick and easy low down.

If you have just one hard drive and you wish you had two, you can divide and conquer.  Of course this does not give you double the storage space, it just gives you two logical drives on one physical drive.   Now it’s possible to divide it up even smaller, and smaller.  This is accomplished by partitioning your hard drive.  There are different type of software for this, but what my friend Sean pointed out to me is definitely worth having.

In the past, it was not something you would want to do when you have data you don’t want to lose, especially your operating system (unless you plan on reinstalling anyway).  Microsoft used to, and possibly still does, include fdisk which could partition your drive.  However, doing so was the equivalent to formatting it first.  It’s not something you wanted to do as an afterthought.

When you install Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.) it will ask if you want to erase your hard drive and start fresh with it being your sole operating system, or if you would like to dual boot (that is having the choice of booting up into Ubuntu or Windows).  If you chose the dual boot option, then it will want to setup a partition, setting aside a portion of the hard drive for Windows and a portion for Ubuntu.  You get to decide the size of the partitions.  It works very well.  I have never lost my Windows operating system once even after a dozen separate installs.  Pretty slick.

A lot of people like to do this the first time they install Ubuntu, so they can keep Windows installed if it turns out they don’t like Ubuntu.   Sometimes too, they may have certain programs that are necessary and work ONLY in Windows.  I use this last option.

Partition Messup

Now one day I was installing Ubuntu for a dual boot setup, however grub kept giving me a hassle.  So I would try to re-install.  I did this a few times.  Then I noticed that my hard drive was shrinking.  Every time that I went to re-install, I was losing an unrecoverable partition from the previous attempt.  Why exactly, I don’t know.

The fix came in the form of GParted.  I downloaded the iso file and burned that to a CD-ROM and then rebooted off the CD.  Up came a graphical interface and I was able to see the partitions of each of my 3 drives.  I was able to delete partitions, make new partitions, or combine partitions.  I was also given a choice of filesystem format from Fat32, NTFS, ext3 and many others.

GParted screen

Problem solved.

This is a disk I will keep in my arsenal for sure.  What’s nice is that it’s a live-cd so if someone needs help with their PC, there’s no need to install any software, download anything, just slap this puppy in the drive and boot.