Yesterday I wrote how I was moving my laptop to Ubuntu from XP. First I am moving my laptop configuration, thinking at least then I will still have a working desktop if everything goes fubar. The sensible thing would actually be to do things the other way round, desktops have an easier time of it moving to Linux apparently. Everything was nice and smooth thankfully apart from two critical pieces
- Display (pretty important if you want to see anything)
- Wifi (if you can’t get an internet connection it is difficult to get any help or download drivers)
The installer decided my display could only manage 640×480. Wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact Ubuntu chose to make their install dialogues taller than this screen. Pretty frustrating having to Alt-F7 to move the windows around so I could click the next buttons (keyboard shortcuts for next and previous wouldn’t work for some reason).
No problem, once it was installed I figured I just had to go into some sort of device selection and choose the actual display adapter rather than some default fallback VGA thing. Heh, I have been in Windows world too long, you don’t think Linux geeks would make it that easy do you?
The device manager applet seems pretty redundant, you can’t actually do much with it from what I can see. Luckily I had a working machine so I could search the interwebs. Fixing the problem was a simple case of going to a terminal window and entering
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
/slaps head oh why didn’t I think of that, it is sooo obvious….. not. What does that even mean? I figure something about reconfiguring the x server?
Some text based “pick-a-number” menus appear. Not much help, I had to Google again to find out which option I needed for my Intel 845GV graphics card. Obviously it was the i810, I must be stupid to not know that. The one easy part was choosing what resolution I wanted to install.
Thankfully I now have a working 1024×768 display. I daren’t try getting better refresh rate and I am not even sure if I am in true or high colour. Looks lovely now though. Not quite as nice as under XP but good enough.
This “fix” right there is why Linux is not ready for prime time. How ridiculous. There is nothing about this fix that is intuitive, easy or even meaningful. I haven’t learnt anything that can help me with my next hardware problem either.
My Wifi card issue has proved a bit more stubborn. Thankfully I can use a wired network connection for now.
{ 6 comments }
Damm, I have the same damm problem, so thanks for the info, will let you know if i find some fix’es for the samsung
Hey Chris, Yeah I have a samsung v25, and I’m having the same problem, I tried your fix, and it does get the graphic card working (I now have dircet rendering). However I can’t get a resolution better than 800*600. It says in /var/log/xorg.0.log “no mode of that name” for the 1024*768. I think i must have selected different options from some of the menu’s that configure /etc/X11/xorgs.config. I have tried messing around with xorgs.config, with not success. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can remember what options you selected?
Mine listed a 1024 res, but I seem to recall there was at least one tutorial that suggested you could edit something to add in missing resolutions but I can’t find the right combination of keywords now
Thanks for the heads up. I am trying linux out for the 1st time in about 3 years as someone at work was trying to convince me that now was the time to give it a shot! i think it was a joke or some things!! This is the 3rd distro i have tried and still not got a running v25. Will give your tips a shot and see how it goes.
cheers
So.. I’ll try your tips.
But, ye know, I think Linux IS ready for home and office use.
It’s just that there aren’t many manufacturer which support Linux…
Hey, I have Ubuntu running, but not the Wifi card… Have you solved wifi issue?
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