Adventures in Switching to Linux

Just a quick post before I go to bed. I finally got an Ubuntu 8.04 beta installed on my laptop with the proprietary video drivers installed and most importantly with wireless access working! For the wireless, all I really needed to do was install the b43-fwcutter package which actually downloaded and installed the firmware as part of the package installation. How nice is that! Using the wifi card with WPA seems to be pretty solid now. It was almost never usable before and I would always a have to connect to good old linksys to get online. Shhh...

I still do not think kindly of the Broadcom 4306 wireless card I have thanks to the lack of openness. I will be doing a lot more hardware research on future computer purchases!

The last time I tried to upgrade to 8.04 it was a disaster. Today I started fresh with the daily DVD image from 4/5/08. I have to get a DVD because the drive in my laptop no longer reads CDs. Installing the DVD went fairly smoothly but then I realized I was just running 7.10 that pointed to the Hardy repositories so I had to preform an upgrade. ~600MB of packages downloaded later... The install/upgrade went well except Mono (the Linux .NET implementation) didn't work so a few applications like F-Spot and Tomboy likely do not work either (I haven't tried them yet).

Anyway, I need some sleep so here it is. Click on the image for the full resolution image.



Ugh, the sun will be here way too soon. Thanks for the info there new world time clock applet.