Luke Ashe-Browne Open source, web technology and feeble attempts at eloquence

Water is good for computers!

This last week has been a trying, interesting, and ultimately disasterous week, money is tight, deadlines are reached, and generally life has happened. A weekend trip away with my family resulted in my laptop developing a drinking problem. As much as you and I may enjoy the refreshment that hydrogen dioxide provides us, computers do not experience the same physiological response. Also the sensible thing to do when ones equipment is doused in liquids, is to turn it off and dont' try to power it up at all untill you are sure it has been fully dried out. But some in my family had not such experience as to know the correct course of action, and only after several attempts at rebooting the laptop was I summoned to my most trusted of sidekicks aid.

At this point there was no saving the poor device, 3 days dissasembled in an airing cubbord were to no avail and I thought all hope was lost. This is where you have to bite the bullet and simply admit that the mother board needs to be replaced. Living in such a houshold as I do, there was readily available an alternate machine with little on it of importance and noone in need of it's service at present. So i moved the GB ram card and harddrive over to it this monday morning, and to my absolute delight,, success. Ubuntu's warm orange on black boot logo shone bright on the HP nx6110's screen and a sort of fluttering sensation filled my chest as a weight was releived from my heart.

Then on to the reconfig. There are a great deal of issues to overcome in the linux world in terms of desktop readyness, but there are also a great deal of benefits of linux over, what will remain unamed propratary operating systems. The hardware needed minimal adjustment, the network card was easily accessed, the usb devices all worked, even the internal wifi card was immediately recognised. The only sticking point was that my old nc6000 was a machine driven by the radeon mobility 9600 graphics card, and this nx6110 is run on an integrated intel 915GM /GMS/910GML Express graphics board. so unfortunately X11 was not readily available upon the first boot. But simple enough was the proceedure of installing the additional xserver-xorg-intel-video package, the drivers needed to integrate the hardware features of the intel chipset into X11. Next I had to tell the X11 system to use the new drivers, the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf hold the key configurations for your Xorg graphics server to operate on. The quickest and easiest way possibly to reset your graphics card just to get X11 upand running is in 2 simple steps. Run "lspci | grep VGA" and make a note of the graphics card you have.

My lspci output

luke@lukenc6000:~$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)

Also note the PCI address of the card, which should be at the start of the line, my card was listed at the address "00:02.0". Next run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg". This will ask you a series of question, most of which will have autodetected answers. Ensure that the make and model family of your card are correct in the detection provided, and ensure that the PCI address mentioned matches what you found under lspci. Keyboard questions and input options will also be covered, so just try to keep it as simple as possible.

Finally, when this command is complete, run "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart". This will restart the gnome desktop manager session, you will arrive back at the usual login screen. Of course the reconfigure of my xserver didn't cover the complexities of my old, much interfered with xorg.conf file. I am a fan of the 3d enhanced desktops available under ubuntu, and had tweaked my radeon graphics configuration within an inch of its life, so as to support the marvels of, the once named beryl, now named compiz-fusion, 3d magic on my desktop.

Somewhere in the post login phase of starting gnome, something was killing my gnome session. Thankfully the options of KDE and xfce are available from the login promt with ubuntu, and many other distributions also. So i was able to jump into KDE and try to remove the offending startup program or settings from the gnome startup options manually and also get back to using my laptop immediately anway.

So what remains unpolished in this new configuration. Well, I have not yet re-enabled the 3d effects. Gnome is still unavailable, and I just miss the battery life of the nc6000. Well time will tell how this setup performs. Check back to the blog for updates as I work with the machine.