2005-04-20
How to Install Ubuntu Linux on an Acer Aspire 2000 Notebook
Hardware Specs:
CPU: Pentium M 1.4GHz
Ethernet: RealTek RTL8139
Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless LAN 2100
GPU: RV250 5c61 (ATI Radeon Mobility 9200 M9+, 128MB
Screen: WXGA (1280×800)
What works with no human configuration on first boot
ATI 3D hardware acceleration (Quake3 ready)
Audio (ALSA)
Touchpad
USB Ports
Memory Card Reader
Wireless
Ethernet
Scroll Wheel Mouse
Pentium-M CPU speedstep (automatically adjusts speed based on usage to conserve battery)
Windows Network Browsing (through Samba)
X Windows — Widescreen resolution of 1280×800 set automatically
Scanning (Canon Scanner)
IEEE1394 (firewire)
Vesa Framebuffer (hi-res console)
What works with a little work
DVD (dma needs to be enabled)
Printing through Samba (how to below)
Palm Pilot (Handspring Visor) hotsync through USB (must set port to /dev/TTYUSB1)
DVD ripping (sorry, how to not available yet, but I got it working with dvd::rip. It can’t encode Vorbis audio, but it can encode mp3 audio into avi or ogm format. PSU must be disabled or it will lock up during transcode).
Audio Streaming (install Realplayer)
What does not work (yet):
Hibernate (well, it does hibernate fine, it doesn’t restore)
Infrared port
Horizontal scrolling
Installing Ubuntu
1. Boot the Ubuntu CD-ROM
At garbled graphic (don’t worry about it) the bottom will show a grub prompt. Press Return.
Select your language (English for me)
Select your Country (United States for me)
It will say: “Your Keyboard is: American English” …press return.
2. Configure the Network
Ubuntu Detects both the Realtek adapter (eth0) and the Intel Pro/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter (eth1). I prefer the wireless so my instructions will reflect such. If you prefer the physical ethernet modify what you do accordingly.
Select Wireless. Note that the wireless module is not loaded yet so it won’t work. Just return through the ESSID and WEP key, we’ll set those later after it reboots. It will say “Network Config Failed.” Just press return and select “Do not configure network at this time.”
Hostname: [enter a hostname]
3. Setup the Partitions
You have two options: Erase entire disk or manually edit the partition table. I have Windows XP Pro and FreeBSD on the system so I went with edit. The easiest way to do this is to delete the partitions that you want to install ubuntu on, then select the FREESPACE and press return. Select “Automatically partition the free space.”
Select “Finish partitioning and write changes to disk”
It will show a message telling you what it is about to do. If it looks good select “YES”
4. Tea Time
Make some tea.
5. Time Zone
Is the hardware clock set to GMT? No.
Select your Time Zone: (If you live in California select Pacific. If not select the correct one for your area).
6. Create a User
Enter a full name for the new user: Benjamin Bryan (you may want to change this to your name)
Enter a password for the new user: [note that the password will not echo on the screen]
Re-enter a password:
7. Boot loader and Reboot
Install grub boot loader to MBR? Select YES.
It will spit out the C. Press return to continue and let it reboot.
When you see Ubuntu starting to boot…
8. Tea Time
Make some more tea.
9. Login
You will be greeted with a login screen. Login.
10 Left-Handed Mouse
If you are not left-handed you can skip the next line.
System Preferences -> Mouse -> Left-handed mouse.
Wireless Network Configuration
Click the down arrow on ESSID to see a list of wireless networks that are detected. Select one or if you know of one that is hiding it’s SSID just type it in manually.
Enter in a WEP key if applicable..
Configuration: select DHCP
Click OK, press the Activate button. Click OK and if you didn’t see any error messages you should have internet.
Mounting Windows XP Partition
$ sudu su
# mkdir /winxp
# mount /dev/hda1 /winxp
(THIS SECTION IS NOT REQUIRED WITH THE LATEST RELEASE, Breezy Badger) — Setup Repositories
System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager
Go to Settings -> Repositories.
Click Add -> Select “Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog” and check the Universe and Metaverse boxes. -> OK
Click Add -> Select “Ubuntu 5.04 Security Updates” -> OK
Click Add -> Select “Ubuntu 5.04 Updates” -> OK
Click Add, -> click Custom,
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat unstable main
Click Add repository -> Click OK.
When “Repositories Changed” comes up press YES to reload the package list.
A warning will come up saying that it can’t verify a public key: 07DC563D1F41B907. Click OK and exit the Synaptic Package Manager. Open up a terminal and become root:
$ sudo su
If you have never used gpg before type gpg to setup the .gnupg stuff then control+C to break out of typing a message to encrypt.
Next type the following:
# gpg –recv-keys 07DC563D1F41B907
# gpg –armor –export 07DC563D1F41B907 | apt-key add -OK
(ref: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/AptAuthenticationInstructionsForHoary)
Next time you open up the Synaptic Package Manager and hit reload it shouldn’t complain about no public key.
Setting Up DVD Playback
Open up the Synaptic Package Manager
Search for “ogle” (Ogle is the ONLY DVD player I have found to work on the Acer Aspire 2000 that can keep the audio in sync with the video throughout the entire movie).
Click the checkbox on Ogle and select “Mark for Installation”. Click Mark.
Do the same thing for “libdvdcss2″ (this may be illegal in the United States but you should be okay installing this in most other countries).
When you have added those two packages hit Apply to install them.
Before ogle will work you need to kill the esd daemon.
$ killall esd
For some reason Ubuntu does not have DMA access enabled on the Acer’s CD/DVD drive by default. You will need to enable to this before playing a DVD or the playback will be choppy:
$ sudu hdparm -d1 /dev/dvd
(you probably want to add the above line to your startup scripts some where)
Upgrades!
When a red icon appears in the notification area I just open Synaptic Package Manager and press the “Mark all upgrades” button. Then click “Smart Upgrade”
Additional Programs I installed:
dvdrip — rip DVDs, I don’t like carrying them around all the time.
k3b — CD-Burner
openoffice.org2 (necessary for printing, see notes below on printing).
openoffice.org2-evolution
openoffice.org2-gnome
gnuchess — backend
gnuchess-book
xboard — Chess (frontend)
flashplayer-mozilla — Macromedia Flash, installs Firefox plugin
dia — for making UML Diagrams
mplayer-586 (for certain types of encoding)
xine-ui (can play CDs, and audio/video files, Totem doesn’t work for me).
wine — for Quicken, oh when will they release a Linux version?
wy60 — Wyse 60 emulation for logging into old Unix systems, if only I could find a Wyse 50 emulator I would be set, I wouldn’t mind paying $50 for one if someone knows of a good one.
Quake III Arena Setup on Linux
Download the Quake3 point release from idSoftware
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/linux/
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/linux/linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run
$ sudo su
# chmod 755 linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run
./linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run
Press ok or yes as often as prompted.
You need to copy the pak0.pk3 file from your Quake 3 Arena CD to /usr/local/games/quake3/baseq3 and you should be ready to go.
If you are dual-booting with Windows and have Quake3 Installed there is no sense installing the pak files a second time. Here is what I did:
# cd /usr/local/games/quake3
# rm -R baseq3
# ln -s /winxp/Program\ Files/Quake\ III\ Arena/baseq3/ .
Since I also have the Urban Terror mod installed I did this as well.
# ln -s /winxp/Program\ Files/Quake\ III\ Arena/q3ut3/ .
# exit
Sound… Quake will nod run with esd running.
$ killall esd
$ quake3
Quake 3’s Urban Terror gets about 60 FPS in the heat of battle. Not great but playable. It runs about 70-80 FPS in Windows XP.
Fonts
The fonts are decent in Ubuntu, but if you work with a lot of people who use Windows or have a lot of documents in Windows you will want to install the msttcorefonts package. Also a lot of additional fonts can be found at http://www.dafont.com/
Touchpad
Ubuntu amazingly sets up the touchpad automatically the tap still does a primary click even after setting my mouse to being left-handed. However it does not have the accidental tap detection that Windows does so if you are typing and tap it by mistake often that can be a problem. You can enable/disable the touchpad on the acer aspires by pressing Fn-F7.
USB Drives
Insert USB Drive into USB port. Ubuntu mounts it automatically.
Memory Card Reader
On the Acer Aspire 2000 this is actually a USB device so when you insert a memory card/stick Ubuntu automatically mounts it like a USB drive.
Printing
I don’t use my printer nearly as much as my family so I moved it to the living room and it is connected to a Windows XP Home Edition computer and I print to it through the network. This is how I setup Ubuntu to print to it through Samba (I am sure that if you are directly connecting to your Printer it would be much easier to setup).
I downloaded the GDI driver for my printer (Samsung ML-1210) from this website:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Samsung-ML-1210
On Ubuntu go to System -> Administration -> Printing.
New Printer, Network Printer, Select Windows Printer (SMB)
for the host I entered “bryan” and the printer was “samsungm”
For the username enter “GUEST” in all caps (took awhile to figure out this one), leave the password blank.
Click Forward -> select Samsung -> ML-1210 -> install driver (select the ppd driver, you hopefully can find one from linuxprintng.org for your printer) -> apply -> print a test page and it should work!
Unfortunately the red, green, and blue on the Ubuntu test page printed out in shades of gray, but what more could I expect from a black and white printer…
Blackdown JAVA
I am sick and tired of Sun’s Java licensing restrictions that only allow downloading from their website. It is too much of a hassle to download, and oftentimes when I’ve needed it their website has been too busy to serve downloads. As a result I have switched to Blackdown-Java
This is how to install Blackdown-Java.
Add this to the repositories:
deb ftp://ftp.tux.org/java/debian/ sarge non-free
Install j2sdk from the package manager.
Scanning
XSane works beautfully with my Canon CanoScan LiDE 20.
Issues I have (not necessarily the fault of Ubuntu)
Printing
In OpenOffice 1.1, for some reason when I print documents they are about half an inch too far down the page. OpenOffice 2 Beta prints better …the line spacing is more than the Windows version of OpenOffice so sometimes I have to adjust it to get my pages to come out exactly the same. Unfortunately OpenOffice 2 has horrid font rendering (looks like ant-droppings) so I do all my composing in OpenOffice 1, then print from OpenOffice 2.
Audio
As far as I can tell two programs can not use the sound card at the same time. So if you are running esd you must kill it before using RealPlayer, Ogle, Quake, etc. There are a few programs that can go through ESD but most communicate directly with ALSA.
Finances
Somebody write a good finance program or convince Quicken to release a Linux version. I’ve tried Gnucash, Moneydance, and others… They aren’t of the quality that I can trust them with financial data. I may end up purchasing a Crossover Office license.
