Thought I would log my experience setting up my laptop with Linux Mint 6.
About the Hardware:
I got a pretty good deal on this from Best Buy on a Black Friday sale. The model number is dv4 1114nr if you’d like to look up the hardware specs. I quickly had Ubuntu 8.10 running on it. Most things worked out of the box. The webcam, the wireless internet, the graphics card, and all the touch buttons up by the screen. the microphone and the neato little remote control were less cooperative.
A Little History:
As time went on a few things were starting to annoy me because I couldn’t manage to fix them. One was that the hibernate and suspend features were not working. A little research and I narrowed this down to a BIOS issue. Basically what that means is there is no way I could fix that with out a special update from HP. Unfortunately they do not provide any BIOS update files that play nice with Linux. I got in touch with them and after they reiterated a few times that they don’t support Linux they sent me a recovery disc. So, backed up my home directory, reinstalled Windows, preformed BIOS update, noted how slow and heavy Windows was, then put in my Linux Mint CD and started over.
Installing, Updating, and Customizing Mint:
The install time was less than 30 min. In contrast it took over 3 hours to run those recovery discs. after the install was complete I connected to my wireless right away, and installed the available updates. about 170MB of them. While that was going on I moved the bottom panel to the top of the screen, changed the wallpaper and theme, and fixed the buggy sound issue that these laptops are known to have. To do that I opened a terminal the Gnome-Do way (just press “super + space” and start typing “term…” and press enter. In the terminal:
Code:
gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
and add this to the end of the file:
Code:
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1
I did a little customizing of my top panel such as:
- removed - windows list,
- added - desktop switcher, system monitor, search files and folders, weather
- hid - gnome do icon (right click and select preferences…)
By now my updates were complete. I decided I wanted to play with the new MintInstall feature so opened that up and hit refresh. Maybe it’s just a first time thing, but it took a looong time to get ready. Maybe a part of that was the screenshots it was loading. I like to have my windows roll up when I double click the title bar, so while that was loading I went into Menu -> Preferences -> Windows and set the “Titlebar Action”. Mint Install was still loading, so I also set my location in the weather applet I had added to the top panel Mint Install was ready so I went to start installing all the stuff I wanted. The screenshots, ratings, and reviews are all neat features, but I wished I could have installed more than one application at a time. While I did abandon MintInstall in favor of Synaptic Package Manager pretty quickly, I do appreciate its simplicity. And better yet, my list of things to install is much shorter than in Ubuntu because Mint, in my opinion, has a much nicer set of default applications - GnomeDo, PulseAudio, SunJava, Thunderbird the Medibuntu package, etc. Of course part of that is because they ignore certain license issues, but it doesn’t bother me as I own all of those licenses already anyway. Plus I am more and more persuaded that intellectual property is an illegitimate concept idea altogether.
Troubleshooting
I still haven’t been able to get my built in mic to work. If I plug a mic in to the jack that does work, though even that took a little messing around with the sound preferences/ pulse audio settings. Skype needed to be adjusted to use pulse, and blocked from auto adjusting mixer levels. Even then the mic is very very quiet (Part of it might be the crappy mic I was using). I tried to run a shell script to install Groovy/Grails syntax highlighting by double clicking. That didn’t work. Odd, and couldn’t figure out how to get it to go. I am no terminal jockey, this much is true