Returning user?

[karoszaska]

Hi, I used Ubuntu a few years ago and loved it. Unfortunately, when I bought my laptop, the installation did not work out at all. I had no control of the battery, my processor was freezing and doing weird stuff, and it would really overheat. I've been stuck using Vista for several years, but for my daily use of the computer, it is excessive and clunky and I miss the clean Ubuntu experience.

I have a HP Pavillion dv9410ca. Does anyone know there's a chance the newest Ubuntu will work for this? Or any dv9000 laptop? I don't want to go back into the war zone and create problems for myself like last time.

[hansdown]

Hi karoszaska.

Why not download the live cd, and see if everything works?

Should I say "welcome back"?

[Shriner]

Using an HP Pavilion dv900 right now. The only thing that you might run into trouble with is the wireless. I had to be connected via ethernet in order to install prober software for it to work. But using the hardware manager made it painless. Note also that was with 8.10 and the 2.26 kernel.....your wireless may or may not be native now, the livecd would tell you that.

[Barry Carroll]

You should definitely try out the live cd as recomended. When you are in the live environment try out the things that would be annoyances for you. These might be:


Wireless
Function Buttons (brightness/volume)
Cpu frequency scaling
Screen resolution


For the cpu scaling you can right-click on the top panel, click 'add to panel' and then add cpu frequency scaling applet. This will show you if your cpu is scaling correctly by going up and down n speed as you do some work.

If the brightness keys don't work you can add the brightness applet in much the same way. If the applet works but the keys don't then that's just the case that you need to map the keys. If neither work then brightness isn't supported but hopefully that won't be the case.

Might be a good idea to try out usb and the card-reader (if any) whilst you are in the live environment too.

Welcome back :)

[karoszaska]

Thanks for the welcome.

So I installed 9.04 desktop version on my HP Pavillion dv9410ca (for the record). I don't like the netbook thing.

So far, the wireless driver seems to work. I just had to enable it in restricted drivers. However, when it connects to my home network owned by my room mate, the connection doesn't actually work. (It can connect to a public wireless though.) It gives full signal, but there is no internet access. A few times, it has worked out, but then there's another problem.

Synaptic fails to download almost all packages. It downloads some, then gets stuck, and doesn't recover even if I try again.

My Firefox is also messed up. None of the buttons work. I can't click Search, or Login on my email.

I tried reinstalling Firefox in Synaptic, but then it tells me that the disk doesn't have enough space to perform the operation.. and something about open> - cache> and failure. This also goes for Update Manager, which originally worked fine when I first updated everything.

Finally, Open Office Wordprocessor crashes immediately upon loading with a fatal error.

I'm not sure if this is just my computer's problem, a bad installation, or the system is deteriorating. I am concerned there's processor or hard drive problems.

[karoszaska]

Nevermind about the problems. I reinstalled the system, and this time I did not let the installer set up the Ubuntu partition for me. It gave it way too little space to function properly, which amazingly ruined everything.

Absolutely everything works!

It even took me no energy to install my GPU driver, which to those unfortunate enough to experience in the past, is a quadrupal pain in the ***.

Wireless works right out of the box.
Sound was a bit confusing, but it works too.

I give this a bit thumbs up for this computer series.