Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Ubuntu 8.03 on the Dell D400 Laptop

This post details the installation and configuration of Ubuntu 8.03 on a Dell Lattitude D400 compact notebook.

Hardware

Intel Pentium mobile cpu @ 1.8 ghz
BIOS ver A08
512 mb ram (upgrading to 1 gig) 266 mhz DDR
Toshiba MK4026 40gig hard disk
12" screen running at 1024x768
Dell wireless 1350 or 1450
Intel 855 chipset with sigmatel 9750 sound and onboard video and lan

Booted the CD and installed without a problem.

Working

Video - desktop effects are enabled
LAN - wired lan connection
Sound - works
WiFi - the Broadcom B43 wireless driver was installed but not sure if it is working

We goto system, administration, network and select the wireless connection. We enter our SSID and set the password type to WEP key (ascii) as it is an open network but when we click OK the setting reverts to WPA personal and no network seems to be picked up. So back to wired for now.

We go to Places, Network to see what shows up. The windows network is found but no shares are listed. Probably because the windows network client is not running or installed. So we run the synaptic package manager and search for SAMBA.

This seems a bit silly as if windows networks do not exist. Windows networking should be setup 'out of the box' to save the time of the user.

We choose to install gaambad - a gui configuration tool for samba, along with samba, nautilus share, and system-config-samba (another gui tool). Apply the changes.

Now when we browse the network we see the d400 in a workgroup, but not ours. So we need to change the samba settings. This can be done in terminal by cd to /etc/samba and using the command sudo pico smb.conf and editing the settings in the config file.

We decide to give the gui interface (gsambad) a try. We add our settings and apply. Of course to take effect samba has to be stopped and started and we did not install those utilities. Let's logout and see.

Now no machines show up in the windows network. And going into the terminal and trying to edit the smb.conf returns the error "unable to resolve host d400"

Interestingly the OSX 10.4 server shows up in the network list and we are able to login. This is not done using smb but sftp.

Also we notice an odd message in the top dock - "no value has been set" where it usually has the login name. Ok that is the user switcher. By right clicking on it we can choose edit personal information or edit users and groups or even setup the login screen. We choose user settings and select properties for my account. The reason for the message is now clear - when creating my account during the install i didn't bother to put in my real name. So we fix it and now it displays my name.

Let's restart. Ok the machine shuts down but does not power up. We pull the plug and remove the battery and power up once more.

No network joy here - no windows workgroups are displayed. We decide to remove gsamabad and the system-config-samba and reinstall the samba components.

However in the /etc/samba directory the smb.conf file is the one setup with gsambad and the original file is now smb.conf.cold.gsambad-0.1.9

Sudo still not working. So we go to the network settings control panel and change the network name and add in the domain. We logout for the settings to take effect.

Log back in but still sudo is not working, same error "unable to resolve host name". Also got a 'dbus error' when connecting to the osx server.

We decide to do a re-install tomorrow so we shut down for the evening.





2 comments:

yanhong said...

dell d400 battery is very cool.

yanhong said...

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