So codersarepeople gave me an old laptop to mess with and I've been messing with it by installing Linux. It's a Gateway M350WVN with a 2.8 Pentium, 512MB memory, 60GB harddrive and Intel graphics driver (this laptop is faster than my desktop by quite a bit... :-/, but its got a bonk soundcard). Somehow, installing Linux was such a hassle.
I wanted to use Ubuntu first, to minimize the hassle I get from configuring Arch Linux but after I put in the disk and spin up. The output was something about not syncing... kernel panic. Okay then, so Arch it is. I installed Arch (so much easier) and tried to configure the wireless Broadcom card. Failure... So I just did a ethernet cable to do a full system upgrade to see if the newest kernel might have somthing in it. Failure in updating... there's was dependency hell on the kernel. I boot up Ubuntu again, this time with acpi=off, success. I installed Ubuntu, restarted and came upon a pretty Gnome desktop. I tried to access the internet through the WiFi again.... failure.
I got sick of Ubuntu so I installed Arch again, this time from a server as to get the most up-to-date stuff. IT WORKS! Then I started to google like crazy to find out how to configure my wireless card. Stupid me, I found out that the BCM4306 rev 2 needs the b43legacy driver, not the plain vanilla b43 that comes with the Arch installation. Now the wireless setup went extremely smooth, but I do want to say that you should install netcfg by now to configure the network.
Now for the demon they call Xorg. From retrospect, I should've copied the Xorg from Ubuntu's config but I didn't think of it. A quick Xorg -configure did the trick, but I found out later that its not good enough. The display was fuzzy and not awesome. After manually configuring the fonts a little bit, messing with the resolution, changing the default stuff etc. I got it to be nice and crisp. So all is well right? Wrong. Then I wanted to have Compiz-Fusion on the computer. Installing it was not hard... but after activating it, the window decorators all went away. I followed countless forums but nothing did the trick... until I come upon another person who had the exact same graphics card with a working Compiz install that uploaded his Xorg.conf file! A copy-paste and moments later... Compiz wonderland!
The rest of the stuff is easy... pacman -S this pacman -S that, maybe a few yaourt -S this, but its starting to turn into a working computer again... except for the fact that it can't play any music.
EDIT: Screenshots
Software: Gnome, Gnome-Do with docky, Internet Explorer with Crossover, Firefox 3.5 beta, Mathematica 7
Non Busy one:
-runiteking1
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I've installed Ubuntu on my current computer as both a dual boot and also in a Virtual Machine. Worked the first time for me, I think because I used the newest version the first time. I used it for a few days, and I enjoyed the new interfaces. But I realized that all my files were back in my Windows System and I enjoyed the freedom offered by Windows rather than the "everything you'll need" motto by Ubuntu.
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