PC Projects- Ubuntu Linux on Dell Laptop

Submitted by tachyon on March 31, 2006 - 9:33am

There was an extra Dell at work, so I formatted it and installed Ubuntu Flight 4.

It crusied along nicely, then choked on the kernel. Then it presented me with a choice of 3 kernels, so I chose the bottom one because it had a version number in it.

That seemed to work fine.

Boots into Ubuntu fine! Now I want to update it to the latest release, by Synaptic Package manager doesn't seem to work. So I need to change the repositories that it is looking in to get the updates. Why does it have to be so convoluted!

Comments

Jon's picture

Submitted by Jon on March 31, 2006 - 7:08pm.

Of course Flight 4 is a beta pre-release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake... The current Flight is up to 5, and there are even many fixes from that release. For a stable install, 5.10 is pretty nice. IIRC In Flight 5 they've included a preview of the new interface look. It's rather orange, but not too horrid.

Submitted by tachyon on April 5, 2006 - 8:25am.

OK, the repositories that came with the Flight 4 CD are out of date or something. The "sources.list" text file in the "apt" folder was localized for Australia, but they wouldn't work. I tried removing the "au." prefix, and that didn't work either.

Adding "us." in front of "archive.ubuntu..." (and uncommenting them of course) then made it work.

SO I ran apt-get update, and downloaded 227MB of updates. All good. Did that again and got a few more.

I was so happy that was all working that I wanted to get back to good old KDE, and make ubuntu into kubuntu... I went to www.kubuntu.org but the files there are only for v5.10, breezy not dapper.

I was shown that they are actually to be found on ubuntulinux.org, if you want the .iso images. Back in synaptic package manager, I located the KDE "master", which grabs all the appropriate libraries, and it was about 330MB! They all downloaded fine, and I left the machine last night decompressing/installing. Tomorrow I should have KDE as well!

Jon's picture

Submitted by Jon on April 5, 2006 - 4:50pm.

Yep, you generally want to start at the repos vefore you go look for software elsewhere. So, you install kubutnu with sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and it should pull down everything you need, and add an option in the GDM login screen to use Gnome, KDE, or whatever "official" desktop padckage you have installed. It's been interesting how many people who are already used to Linux try to "go find" the software they want, before they jsut dive into Synaptic/apt. Everything in the regular repos is already tweaked and fixed to install cleanly into Ubuntu, so the only reason to look elsewhere is if the software you want is not in there, or if you need a bleeding edge version.

Submitted by tachyon on April 11, 2006 - 5:01pm.

Yes thanks Jon, the repositories are the way to go.

So KDE installed fine, except now when it boots there is an error dialog about KDE being unable to find one of the themes.

It also took over the xsession manager, so I get the big blue "K" at the login window (or whatever it's called on Linux)

But I wasn't satisfied. Seeing how my favourite window manager is Fluxbox http://www.fluxbox.org/ I wanted to get that going. The site itself isn't much help for newbies, but luckily the ubuntuforums has a posting on how to get it running. Just in case you try it, method Angel was the one that worked. Once again, I get an error dialog before it starts up which I'm not sure how to get rid of, but it does work.

Now I have Gnome, KDE and Fluxbox. I'm so happy!

Submitted by tachyon on May 8, 2006 - 7:43am.

ever since I've been bringing the laptop home-- switching between my home wireless network and work's-- I have been having network issues.

I can often get the unit to ping the router but it can't resolve addresses in spite of having a correct & valid DNS address.

ifconfig is there- buried away in /sbin, not part of the PATH. Trouble is I don'tknow how to use it instead of the GUI tools.

Also, the network profiles don't seem to work properly. It's time to do an update but I can't get the networking happening to do so!

Submitted by tachyon on June 2, 2006 - 10:44pm.

The problem seems to be that Dapper doesn't handle saving Locations quite as well as OS X does. It doesn't seem to save the stuff you type into the window.

Trying to stay current, I've been trying to update... tried lots of different repositories, but I still get this error:

Cannot initiate the connection to 8080:80 (0.0.31.144). - connect (22 Invalid argument)

I thought I'd post it because I can only find one other instance of it out there on the web.

on http://www.debianhelp.org/module-pnForum-viewtopic-theme-Printer-topic-10045.html

He seems to say the servers are just busy. Well if that's the case why don't they just tell me properly?

Submitted by tachyon on June 7, 2006 - 9:46am.

I still get this error:

Cannot initiate the connection to 8080:80 (0.0.31.144). - connect (22 Invalid argument)

I found the problem. apt doesn't use the System-wide Network Proxy settings. The person that helped me out getting Ubuntu set up at work had configured it for our Proxy server while I wasn't paying attention. So I modified my apt.conf file to get rid of the extra lines, and now Synaptic sees the repositories and works fine!

One trick I found on the fora that may come in handy was to backup your sources.list file, then delete everything in it, save and close, and run sudo aptitude update. It rebuilds the indexes and then you can restore the sources.list file and run it again. Then try running Synaptic again.

Submitted by darius on September 19, 2006 - 3:58am.

export http_proxy='http://proxserver:port'

than

sudo apt-get update

and that's it. By the way don't forget to put http:// before the proxyserver, otherwise, it'll not work.