Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron Linux on IBM T22 Laptop

Date May 2008

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
Pentium III "coppermine" Processor, 900 MHz. BIOS upgraded in 2005 to latest available.	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
14.1 TFT Display	Works	defaults to 1024 x 768 No special procedure required during installation
Trackpoint	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Keyboard (UK)	Works	No special procedure required during installation
On-board Video and Sound	Works	No special procedure required during installation
512MB (system maximum), SDRAM, 2DIMMs	Works	No special procedure required during installation
60 GB Fujitsu ATA Hard Drive (replacement)	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Modular Floppy Drive	Not tested	floppy drive lost
Integrated 10/100 Network Card with 56k modem	RJ45 ethernet Works, modem not tested.	No special procedure required during installation
Onboard Sound Card	Works	System - Preferences - Sound, then change all sound options from Automatic to "ALSA"
BT Home Hub via RJ45 and Firefox, and via Wi-Fi using WEP and WPA-PSK	Works on BT Total Broadband	No special procedure required during installation
Belkin F5D7050 USB 2.0 wireless dongle	Works out of box on WEP, and with tweak on WPA-PSK	Requires manual edit of wireless config file for WPA-PSK and creation of script shell at boot-up
Belkin F5U222 USB 2.0 HUB Notebook card	Works	No special procedure required during installation Supports two USB2.0 devices.
USB memory stick 256Mb	Works	in Belkin card
Logitech Marble Mouse	Works	In USB 1.1 socket. No special procedure required during installation
Tchibo wireless keyboard with USB dongle	Works	Supermarket special £7
Canon 9950F scanner	Does NOT Work	No driver in Linux kernel

Conclusion

Should have been perfect. Certainly loaded cleanly, Codecs acquired automatically on request. Finally managed to get audio to work by going to System - Preferences - Sound, then change all sound options from Automatic to "ALSA". Loaded Mozilla Flash plugin non-free using Synaptic system and BBC iPlayer audio and TV catch-up streaming works fine. Everything else seems to be there and working well. As usual to get DVDs working you have to Google a bit more for the codecs that seem to be illegal but freely available - I found a script that installed them all, but as usual I can't find it again on Google as there are so many.
Hardy is a clean leading-edge distro that is also well documented and generally behaves well.

As you would expect with an IBM machine allegedly designed for Linux as well as Windoze , Ubuntu 8 does everything Windows XP does as a "desktop" and as fast. The community doco and forums are much better than a few years ago and info is usually found within a few clicks. I also recommend a good book like Ubuntu Hacks (pub. O'Reilly) though it too has gotten out of date quickly. You will need the forum for updated repository addresses, especially for legally ambiguous things like codecs.

Installed in dual boot with XP, it needed a manual tweak to the grub config to make XP the default boot. (PCLinuxOS has a superior graphical grub screen.)

Installation of Ubuntu Hardy Heron LTS

Source: Single CD from The Linux Man
Soon after switching on, hit F12 several times to select boot device (DVD ROM) and boot on CD. There have been some complaints in forums about troublesome installations on earlier distros, and I had been unable to load 6.10 and others with contemporary kernels on previous attempts.

I'm pleased to say Hardy Heron loaded first time on default settings, once I had realised it was best to format the partitions during the install.

The standard option installs a live cd with an install option. Once finally loaded fully through to the Gnome desktop, the install option icon appears. I double clicked this and the install started.

I chose Manual install. I had already created three partitions, Swap at 1GB and two others at 5GB. Hardy comes wih gparted in the install procedure. I allocated Swap to Swap partition, / to one 5GB partition, and /home to the other 5GB partition. The first time it failed and I retried with ticking the option to format both / and /home partitions during installation, then it worked.
I elected to Import XP Docs and Settings, and although it didn't copy the files it did set up empty mount points for My Music, My Documents etc.
Install took about 30 minutes and after a restart I was in.

I had to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to change the default booted OS to be XP.

Wifi

This was my reason for dropping Dapper in favour of PCLinuxOS the pevious year. The control panel has options to set up a wifi connection in both WEP and WPA. The WEP was a doddle, just went through the wireless manager, put in the key against the detected SSID of choice and off it went.

WPA-PSK was not so easy. Despite all the options being there to connect, it refused. WPA-Supplicant was already installed. By Googling the problem and several versions of the fix I found http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202834&page=139 fix.

MANY thanks to contributor wieman01 - a true diamond among forum members.

The fix is as follows:

First thing to do is to generate the internal WPA key to match your SSID and passphrase. If your passphrase contains spaces, use the quotes round it. e.g. for SSID Belkin54g, and passphrase "I wandered lonely as a cloud"

In a Terminal Session type the command...

wpa_passphrase Belkin54g "i wandered lonely as a cloud"
And hit enter

This will produce and display a long hex encoded WPA-PSK key which you should copy and paste into a notepad session

Edit the config file..
sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

Then replace the contents if the file with this version (the IP addresses , SSID and passphrase should be changed to suit your router!)

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.1.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.254
wpa-driver wext
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-ssid Belkin54g
wpa-group TKIP
wpa-psk (paste-in the hex key generated by the wpa_passphrase command without brackets)
auto wlan0


and save the file.


Then in Terminal type the command
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

That will get the WPA-PSK working. Unfortunately you now have the option of doing the last command every time you log in, or create a script to run at login time...

Create startup script:

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/wireless-network.sh

Add this line & save file:
/etc/init.d/networking restart

Change permission (executable):
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/wireless-network.sh

Create symbolic link:
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/wireless-network.sh /etc/rcS.d/S40wireless-network

Note: You may have to choose a boot sequence other than S40 but it worked for me.

Restart Linux.

PHEW - what a palava! Surely that can be downloded as a fix????



Full Acknowledgement to contributor Wieman01 on the Ubuntu Forum