Monday, April 2, 2007

Installing Ubuntu

I've installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn beta on my Amilo.
In the beginning I installed Kubuntu, but having been a Gnome user for some time, I really don't feel at home with KDE. Anyway, since Ubuntu and Kubuntu share the same structure, only with different desktop managers, the results should be the same.

Installation runs smoothly and no particular instructions are needed. After a couple of days of use I can say that all the most important things work, with a few exceptions:

- 4-in1 card reader worked until the Update Manager asked me to make a "Partial Upgrade". That caused the installation of a new kernel (2.6.20-13) that seems not to like the card reader. Solution: boot with the older kernel (2.6.20-12).
- The touchpad won't work after a "resume" from suspend-to-ram. This seems to be a common problem with Synaptics touchpads, as a quick google search showed. Solution: none at the moment.
- Microphone: another long-known problem, still with no solution. I've found a tutorial that claimed to solve the problem but instead it made Ubuntu not recognize my sound card anymore.
- The light sensor that automatically adjusts the display's contrast/brightness does not work actually works! Solution: none needed.
- The silent mode button does not work. Solution: none at the moment.
- The Num Lock button does not work.

Power management in Gnome is not the greatest. Anyway with the default settings, both suspend-to-ram ("Suspend") and suspend-to-disk ("Hibernate") work.
It's said that installing powersaved helped but I couldn't manage to make it work. Probably powersaved works better, but I could not manage to make Suspend and Hibernate work with this method, so I went back to the default power management.

That's all I can think of right now. I'll make a complete report about what works and what doesn't soon. But in a few words I can say that the Amilo SI1520 is reasonably linux-friendly.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

they sound like quite irksome problems - i suppose you can't really expect more from linux on a laptop at the mo... (unless it's a thinkpad...)

v informative post in any case!

Sciamano said...

AFAIK, Thinkpad works well, but have some problems too. For example the faulty touchpad after a resume is present in Thinkpads too..
Let's hope future kernels solve this problem.