Monday, November 28, 2011

Some things to do after a fresh Ubuntu install

Open up a terminal screen and paste in the following text, then hit enter:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras non-free-codecs p7zip-rar acroread gimp inkscape blender vlc libdvdcss2 libdvdread4 faac faad audacious rubyripper cd-discid aacplusenc gtkpod lame cdrdao aacgain flac mp3gain normalize-audio vorbisgain arista soundconverter gnome-sushi winff devede openshot audacity cheese synaptic gconf-editor

Sunday, November 13, 2011

HP G6 (i5) - Ubuntu 11.10 install

So my wife bought a new laptop as above and wanted Ubuntu installed. Wow what a task on this computer. All 4 primary partitions were alread used (windows, windows recovery file, HP bios tools, HP full image of the drive recovery tools). So first you have to eliminate one. I deleted the windows recovery partition with gParted. Then I merged or grew the windows boot partition into the newly unalocated partition.

Next, I found that the LiveCD would boot to a blank screen, so I had to edit the the kernel boot line to include the "nomodeset" command and the install went fine (wrong resolution though).

After the install I found that no matter what, the LCD was black after boot. After days of googleing I found the solution below.

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

 

And change the option row GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" as follow:   

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor splash"

 

Then update Grub installation with the command:

sudo update-grub

 

and restart the notebook.

Probem solved, but with a minor quirk or two... If you close the loptop lid, the screen will be black again when you open it. All you have to do is use the keyboard function that raises the brightness and it's back to normal. It seems that closing the lid turns the screen brightness to completely off.

Next, becareful not to hit the button that turns off the wireless. It turns off the radio and it won't come back on unless you reboot.

That's it, everything else works fine. If you use this information to help you with YOUR install and it works that's great. Remember this is not intended to be a guide but it's actually notes for me to use if I need to do a reinstall.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

How to add the Medibuntu Repository to Ubuntu 11.04+

Open a terminal and paste the following and hit enter. You will be prompted for your password, enter the password and hit enter. DONE!

Using this method will add hooks to the USC (Ubuntu Software Center) so that the packages from the medibuntu repository will show up in the software center app.

sudo -E wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get -y --force-yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu && sudo sed -i "/^# deb .*partner/ s/^# //" /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo apt-get --quiet update