My new ASUS X51R laptop and Ubuntu 8.04
Posted by Nazly on Saturday, 21st June 2008 15:31:19 (GMT +0530)After giving up my IBM Thinkpad laptop sometime back, I got used to working on Desktops for a while. But it didn't help me a great deal in organizing things when shifting my work from home to office and vice versa. So again I started hunting for a laptop that will fulfill all my needs. Finally I settled with an ASUS X51R notebook that comes with a Dual Core 2Ghz processor, 1GB RAM, 256MB ATI VGA Card, 120GB Hard disk, DVD Writer, Wireless etc.. It turned out to be good deal at the end so I went for it.
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.
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 http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz
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
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
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
Comments
I'm a new to ubuntu i've tried to install the Ubuntu Server V8.4, but by default it starts with CLI mode, then i tried executing command "startx" but it didn't help. please advice how to switch to GUI mode.
Posted by techtalks on Saturday, 28th June 2008 21:29:38 (GMT +0530)
Posted by Nazly on Saturday, 28th June 2008 23:06:34 (GMT +0530)
Thanks for the info Nazly. That's one problem down for me. How does cairo-dock work on your laptop? Did you try it? Also do you experience any slow downs when using emerald?
Posted by Ilham Uwias on Tuesday, 1st July 2008 16:09:23 (GMT +0530)
Posted by Nazly on Tuesday, 1st July 2008 17:56:25 (GMT +0530)
Posted by jay on Wednesday, 9th July 2008 16:27:09 (GMT +0530)
Posted by Nazly on Wednesday, 9th July 2008 17:19:07 (GMT +0530)
Posted by davisr on Saturday, 26th July 2008 09:23:14 (GMT +0530)
Die Hard 4.0 - Matthew Farrel's theme
And you will need this GTK theme to suit the Emeral theme
Clearlooks_blackblue
Posted by Nazly on Saturday, 26th July 2008 11:04:49 (GMT +0530)
Posted by Bob on Saturday, 9th August 2008 12:02:38 (GMT +0530)
Posted by Theja on Wednesday, 12th November 2008 18:46:37 (GMT +0530)