Ubuntu strikes again, it’s been a while since I installed it last and here’s the make-up.
My Dell Studio 15 came with Vista pre-installed. I tried to use the internal “Shrink Volume” as much as possible but didn’t get it too far — even when I used JK Defag (which is excellent at what it can do), turned off paging, etc. So burned a LiveCD of GParted and it worked like a charm.
Created my swap (2x memory), shared (big FAT32 drive for sharing files between windows and linux without needing any extra magic) and the ext3 partition for ubuntu itself.
Rebooted into Vista — got a lovely “One of your volumes needs to be checked for consistency…” or similar, which I’m told happens every time you touch the drives when Vista is off, but it ran through the bug checking and then booted into Vista no problem. (My brother made the comment that it thought my whole laptop was doomed when he heard what I was doing — he’s not a big linux fan).
Next, Ubuntu 9.0.4…. downloaded, burned but with errors. All the checksums worked out, so, confused, I tried another download, it burned without errors but when I tried to boot off it the installer kept freezing.
My frustration continued and eventually I stuck it on a USB key that I’d turned bootable with UNetBootin, which is a cool little app that lets you specify an ISO or pick your distribution to use, and changed by Dell boot config to check the USB drive earlier on.
Loaded the installer, chose to manually configure the partition allocation, chose them all, even selected my shared drive — I’ve since decided this was a mistake as it was stuck as root owner and I couldn’t get it to work nicely with samba — one of my friend’s make samba work for me, but that’s another story/post.
End of the day — everything pretty much worked!
- Media buttons — yes. The media center launches Rythymbox out of the box!
- Sound — yes. Out of the box — but very low — fixed.
- Microphone — yes. Out of the box? Not quite.
So what’s up with the Mic? I’d heard reports of problems back with 8.0.4 but I hoped it would all be ok
So I popped up Sound Recorder (Applications -> Sound & Video) and hit record …. nothing. The fix I found at ubuntuforums.org, thanks pspotts!
As for the low volume, in the same preferences you can also see the “Mixer” levels, and I saw that the normal “front” sound was set to ~85% — upping this to 100% and all my volume issues have disappeared. Happy!
da best. Keep it going! Thank you
what about the brightness control ? 1555 with 9.04 had issues .. i was finding my screen very bright , the only way to control brightness was the rebuild kernel with some changes or maybe a different ACPI settings.
in 9.10 the problems with the brightness still aren’t solved for me. 1 time I could adjust it, other times nothing.