Ubuntu Experience.
Following the last post about network problems and dodgy Firewalls. This time I decided to install Ubuntu on my laptop. I have to be honest saying that it was my first time installing something *nix.
This time I received some cd's from Ubuntu.com.
From this CD you can either run Ubuntu as a Live CD (not having to install anything on your machine) or from the Live CD go for an installation. I backed up my whole laptop and decided to give it a try.
The wizards are really intuitive. You have to answer some questions for configuration purposes and then it's time to create a new partition.
I was really scared when I saw the partition screen, as I was completely sure it was gonna destroy my Windows installation. Can you imagine Linux doing something good for your fragile Windows?
I was wrong, it's really neat, and it easily gave me the option to create the partitions manually, so I created one new partition for the root "/" (must have minimum 2GB space) and another one for the swap (minimum 256mb space).
Then clicked next, confirmed the installation and off it went. In 15 minutes I had Ubuntu running like it had been installed for months, as I didn't even had to bother with drivers.
As previously said, I use a wireless router in my place and was really afraid it wasn't gonna recognize it. Again for my surprise, as soon as I got it installed I was able to browse for all the wireless networks on the neighborhood.
My problem: Now I can see all the networks, but for some reason I can't connect to it. It says there's an error with the hardware. I know the hardware is OK as it works on my Windows Installation, but was reading about something related to a Built In Firewall in the Ubuntu installation.
Will check that tonight and update this entry from my brand new Ubuntu installation.
This is a known problem.
AFAIK this problem may have two causes
1) You use static IP-address for your computer
The best solution for this problem will be to configure router to give you IP-address by MAC-address
2) Your wireless network uses WPA.
So you need to install three packages (two or one of them may be already installed)
wpasupplicant, network-manager-gnome and network-manager
You may use graphical application Synaptic to install them or you may use terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant network-manager-gnome network-manager
Sorry for my english, by the way ;)
O mean, I still get one error called SIOCGIFFLAGS because I'm using centrino, but it connects and I can even browse :-)
Next step will be install ColdFusion.
Cheers
and am hesitating to install on my system because of disk space constraint. appreciate your advice, thanks.
>>and am hesitating to install on my system because of disk space constraint. appreciate your advice, thanks.
If you do not use WPA in your wireless network, you should not have problems with enabling wifi from LiveCD.
If you do use WPA then (AFAIK) you can't enable your wireless directly from LiveCD, you need to install Ubuntu.
This feature (WPA-support out of the box) will be available in the next release of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn). It's to buggy for current moment to include it into LiveCD.