Ubuntu (post) install issues 7.10

I had no issues with Ubuntu installation procedure as such, in fact it was very easy to install. I am not going to describe how to install Ubuntu on your computer, in fact you can refer to Ubuntu website for that. Here I am trying to present some post installation issues, which were blocking me to use it as a full fledged Desktop for all my needs.

I had used Red Hat Linux during my college days and I enjoy using the powerful shell that Unix/Linux provides. My friend told me that Ubuntu works fine on Laptops. So I decided to try it out on mine (DELL Inspiron 6400 Laptop with Vista pre-installed). Downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 from Ubuntu website, and installed it.

BIT OF INFORMATION:
By default Ubuntu does not give you a root account. Instead use "sudo" before any command to run it as root/admin. Thus to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf → Will not work, as its a privileged file and a normal user can't save changes to it.
sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf → Works; it might prompt for a password. Just enter user (created during installation) pwd.

Boot-up issue:
The first issue I had after successful installation is that I could not see the GUI, I could only login in cmd mode. After a bit of search in the Internet came to know that for a DELL Laptop's we might need to modify the X11 configuration i.e /etc/X11/xorg.conf needs to be modified. Did the below modifications,

Login in (recovery) mode and add the below last 3 lines in file /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
HorizSync 36-52
VertRefresh 36-60
Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS, AUTO"

in the next boot showed a nice brown GNOME desktop. I was very happy to see a Linux Desktop on my Laptop.

Connecting to internet:
Connecting to internet was seamless, just plug-in the broadband cable and rest is automatic, you are connected to net. This is case only if you have DHCP kind of configuration with ISP. Airtel Broadband works fine.

Multimedia play:
One these display issue was sorted out, I just tried playing a .mp3 files, however it said codec missing and prompted for download when you say "YES", the rest is done. This is the same for any preparatory audio/video formats. I guess these codecs are not supplied in the default installer as they are preparatory or due to license issues. However this is not a problem really if you have internet. Otherwise sad thing is you wont be able to listen music unless they are open formats like .ogg etc. Anyway I installed my favorite media player "vlc", which supports most of the formats without any codec dependency. I use the same in Windows, thats the reason I installed this. The default media player - “Totem Player” works fine and there are no issues.

C-Compiler (gcc) issue:
Basically I am a C programmer so I was curious to check whether C compilation works fine or not. Started writing a "Hello world" program to check the compilation. To my surprise it was not compiling. gcc and make were there, however necessary stdlib header files and libraries were missing. Once you are connected to internet, installing any package is trivial. We can either use "Synaptic Package Manager" or the cmd line "apt-get install ". Both are really good. Making C program compile is essay, just install “build-essential” package either from "Synaptic Package Manager" or cmd line as,

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Luckily this package comes with a installation CD, thus even if you don't have a internet connection you would still be able to install this, Which is very good thing. To install C manual and full fledged Vim editor you need internet connection and below are the commands

sudo apt-get install manpages-dev glibc-doc → for man pages
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev → for ncurses.h

TIP: Can also use System | Administration | Synaptic Package Manager to install any package trough GUI.

sudo apt-get install vim-runtime
sudo apt-get install vim-full
sudo apt-get install gvim

Above command gets you all capabilities of favorite VIM editor.

Automatic update works very well in Ubuntu. In fact I updated to 8.10 from 7.10 through net. It was a two step process 7.10 → 8.04 (LTS) → 8.10. I would better recommend installing Latest version directly as it takes lot of time for updates. One nice thing is that 8.10 had Brasso, a nice CD burning tool. Earlier version had something like ISO write, which also worked well.

The best part is it even prompted for installing ATI Radeon drivers automatically, which helped in getting all the Power related options working like Hibernate. This was not the case in Mandriva even when I updated over the internet. Still Hibernate doesn't seems to work :-(

Ubuntu is a very simple to use and elegant Linux distro I enjoyed using it. I strongly recommend it. As a personal observation, it was very stable in my Laptop compared to Mandriva, however Mandriva was giving a best look & feel and simpler user interfaces similar to Windows. The choice depends on your taste and requirements.