This may be helpful to someone, so I’ll keep this post alive.
Mark Bieda HP Linux install installation
This is just a brief post about my (read: my student’s) experience with installing linux on a new HP Pavilion. This is a standard model available at Futureshop and BestBuy: intel quadcore Q6660 processor, 640 Gb harddisk, 3 Gb RAM. Nice machine, only $899 here in Canada (sure to be cheaper in the USA).
So I’ve installed linux on several laptops and desktops, including Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, Suse. And of course I have run Knoppix and, as indicated in an earlier post, have been using DSL (Damn Small Linux) under VMPlayer for a while now.
So this time, let the undergrad do it!
Here are the notes:
(1) this computer had Windows Vista on it. Home Premium edition. We wanted to keep windows, not because I love windows, but because I have some key software that only runs on windows (e.g. NimbleGen SignalMap for looking at data).
(2) Installation of OpenSuse 10.3 caused a conflict with the windows system which led to a restore operation (nothing was lost, no big deal). So we dropped working on this one – and went to working on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
(3) The big problem was that the ethernet card, built into the motherboard, has known problems with talking to current linux distros. The joy of a new computer!
(4) Ubuntu installed well except for the ethernet card deal, which is a big problem.
(5) To solve the ethernet card problem, we just ended up buying a new card for the computer – it was only $19.76 at our friendly University of Calgary MicroIT store. Model is “Gigabit Ethernet PCI Card” from startech.com. The model number appears to be ST1000BT32. This solved the problem, although MFU (My Friendly Undergrad) had to do something to disable the BIOS from trying to connect to the one in the motherboard (which was not deadly, but led to one of those long pauses in bootup).
The Results
Everything seems to run very well. The computer is happy, it talks to the internet (from both windows and linux) and, as usual, everything runs just a bit (or a lot, depending) on the linux side vs the windows side.
On KDE
I am a longtime KDE user, and I really like KDE in this distribution (downloaded and installed as packages in Ubuntu). I guess it is technically Kubuntu, but like I said, the undergrad was doing the installation so… I got to skip on thinking about this stuff.
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