I’ve been working with the servers most of the time, and few days ago, i had free time to test ubuntu on one of my laptop, it’s not new but not too old either, it’s dual core MSI VR320 and guess what it’s kinda frustrating to have issues on this laptop upon installing ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04.
with 8.04, wifi (using WPA-PSK at home) is not working and sound is looping
with 9.04, wifi is ok but audio playback is damn too slow.
8.04 or known as hardy heron, I have no wifi. I tried to use ndiswrapper to use my windows drivers but no avail. I have an Ralink RT61 chipset and tried installing it’s linux drivers but failed. Here’s what I did:
a. download driver from ralinktech.com
b. uncompress the tarball file “2005_1230_RT61_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.0.tar.gz” and follow the readme for installing
$ sudo cp Makefile.6 Makefile $ sudo make all $ sudo mkdir /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/ $ sudo cp *.bin /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/. $ sudo cp rt61sta.dat /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/.
c. edit /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/rt61sta.dat
$ cd /etc/Wireless/RT61STA $ sudo vi -b rt61sta.dat
d. copy the rt61.ko driver file to the modules folder, after that load it
$ sudo cp rt61.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/. $ sudo depmod $ sudo modprobe rt61
e. check if driver loaded
$iwconfig
I can connect thru unsecured wifi, but for WPA it cannot. Tried wpa_supplicant but again failed
RESULT: FAILED
Looping sound issue- did not bother to troubleshoot it
For 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope, i can connect to my WPA without problems but audio playback is very slow, my mp3s are messed. It’s never a performance issue.
I thought it’s my Realtek HD audio driver, so it’s time to test to upgrade my alsa driver. I downloaded the latest version which is 1.0.21 and compile it
Here’s what I did:
sudo rm /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ubuntu/media/snd-hda-intel/snd-hda-intel.ko sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev sudo cd /usr/src sudo mkdir alsa sudo cd alsa sudo wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.21.tar.bz2 sudo tar -xf alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2 sudo cd alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2 sudo ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel sudo make sudo make install
RESULT: FAILED
SOLUTION: More GOOGLE
There I got the idea to use i386 kernel instead of the default generic linux. I thought an apt-get update and upgrade will do the trick, but later thought just a waste of bandwidth
I fire the command:
$sudo apt-get install linux-headers-386 linux-image-386 linux-386
Reboot and then select that on grub to boot
Then alas, all problems were gone
RESULT: SUCCESS
Well, I guess it’s not really an ubuntu issue, it’s more on the hardware part.
Anyway, stressing but good experience in the end
Conclusion: Google is still my best friend.
BTW, I just tried Opensuse this morning, and wifi WPA and sound card issue as well. my laptop really for i386 kernel only.
