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    Installing Ubuntu 7.10 on a Dell Inspiron 5500

    By booyaa | March 16, 2008

    Yeah I hear you scoff, surely a modern day Linux distro should be able to install on any laptop? That was my thoughts exactly…

    Several reboots later I was no closer to a working version of Linux. I suspect this due to lack of RAM (I’ve only got 128MB to play with) and suspect video detection code.

    I even tried PCLinux, Fedora and Mandriva. No joy.

    I should probably provide some background info, the laptop already has XP. My goal was to install Ubuntu on the remaining space and have both systems available as boot options in Grub. My copy of Ubuntu is the full DVD i.e. has most of the packages and doesn’t require a working net connection to install the GNOME desktop. For network access I had a spare PCMCIA Buffalo WLAN card (Orinoco based, WLI-PCM-L11) which failed to configure at install time.

    My final solution was to install Ubuntu using server mode. Skip the network configuration if you have the same WLAN card as me, I suspect Ubuntu’s only truly happy with a wired LAN connection. You may have to do a failed network configuration, just to allow Ubuntu to skip the section. Finally when prompted to select the packages to configure on the server i.e. DNS, LAMP, etc skip this section too.

    Install the Ubuntu desktop using: sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

    After a long wait, you may get notice that several packages failed to install. This may be due to low memory again, so to fix the problem run the command again.

    Finally you can either reboot which causes Ubuntu to start in X Windows login chooser mode or run startx (if you’re hard core and hate the windows method of installing software).

    I’m now in the process of getting fluxbox to work as gnome causes lotsa paging out. If I make progress I’ll do an update post.

    The Installing Ubuntu 7.10 on a Dell Inspiron 5500 by booyaa dot org, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

    Topics: default |

    One Response to “Installing Ubuntu 7.10 on a Dell Inspiron 5500”

    1. Neil Says:
      March 16th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

      Good post..

      While it’s a shame you couldn’t install easily, it’s interesting to note that that you also had problems on an older laptop.

      I had all sorts of problems with 7.04 on an IBM X30 subnotebook, and an aging Clevo box before then. In fact, the only laptop I’ve successfully installed Linux on was an Acer…and even then, I had a massive battle to get WLAN working!

      Hence the EeePC, I spose - in the end, it Just Works.

      Regards

      Neil

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