I loaded my OS of choice Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on this and everything went very smoothly except that I couldn't get the wireless working. By running lspci the wireless card was shown as Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter which is an Atheros AR5007EG wireless card. The proprietary driver for Atheros was installed by Hardy but when I ran iwconfig this is what I got.

lo        no wireless extensions.
 
eth0      no wireless extensions.

Few google searches resulted me about madwifi. Madwifi is a team of volunteer developers working on Linux kernel drivers for Wireless LAN devices with Atheros chipsets. I got madwifi installed and got my wireless card working. Here is how I did it.

First I disabled both proprietary drivers in System -> Administration -> Hardware drivers.

Then in the command prompt I did the following

Get this version of madwifi

wget -c <a href="http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz" target="_blank">http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz</a>

Untar the file

tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

Move inside the directory

cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007

You might need build-essential if you haven't compiled anything before

sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install build-essential

Building madwifi and installing the modules

make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci
sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

Loading module at boot

sudo gedit /etc/modules

Enter the line below in the last line of the file and save.

ath_pci

Thats it. I restarted the machine and ran iwconfig again to check

lo        no wireless extensions.
 
eth0      no wireless extensions.
 
wifi0     no wireless extensions.
 
ath0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:""  Nickname:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated   
          Bit Rate:0 kb/s   Tx-Power:17 dBm   Sensitivity=1/1  
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=0/70  Signal level=0 dBm  Noise level=0 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

As you can see its now showing that the wireless card is working properly. Thanks to madwifi.

When it came to my graphic card I had to use the ATI propriety driver to make full use of it. Since Hardy comes with compiz out of the box I managed to get the 3D desktop working without much hassle.

To get compiz working in Hardy there are two things to be done.

1. Goto System -> Preferences – Appearance and click Visual Effects tab. Then tick Extra to get the effects working.

2. Install the Compiz Settings Manager.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

After installing you can goto System -> Preferences – Advanced Desktop Effects Settings to add/configure/remove effects related to compiz.

I also enabled Emerald themes to get out of the standard Gnome look. Here is how got emerald working.

sudo apt-get install emerald

Now if you goto System -> Preferences – Emerald Theme Manager you can configure an Emerald theme of your choice. By default it doesn't come with any themes so you need to download themes from Gnome-Look.

However you need to tell compiz to use Emerald as its Window Decorator. To do that goto System -> Preferences – Advanced Desktop Effects Settings and under Effects category click on the Window Decoration icon which will take you to its settings. In the 'Command' field delete whatever is in there and add this value to that field

emerald --replace.

Have fun..

I found a nice Emerald theme which kinda reflects the one used by Matt Farrell in the movie Die Hard 4.0. Here are few screeshots of my desktop.

3D desktop with compiz on Hardy

Desktop with new look theme

I didn't have 3G enabled on my connection so I got it enabled from Dialog. When I initially added the settings for GPRS, WAP and MMS there were few issues so I had a chat online with the Dialog customer service and they sent the configuration settings via SMS. After setting them up everything worked smoothly. At home and at office I'm within the 3G network. So relatively have a good connection speed. I setup Dialog TV as well which again I got the settings from Dialog via SMS. It streams very well without breaking up.

I'm really impressed with this new phone coz it has some nice little features that I have been missing all this while. So don't forget to make a video call when you call me next time

You can check My Flickr Gallery where I have uploaded the photos I took recently using the camera.

I got myself a notebook, an 'IBM Thinkpad' to sort out the problems I have when it comes to managing my data. Things are much organized now. Its running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and I'm really impressed. Wireless works pretty well as I'm using the best out of the wireless network at our office.