Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my IBM Thinkpad R50e

I decided to upgrade from 9.04 to 10.04 LTS the other day. I was hoping the installation will be smooth. However, the installation suddenly stopped after a few minutes with the display going blank and disk activity stopping. After some googling, I found out that is a bug that occurs in systems with Intel graphics adapters. I found a workaround here. Specifically, I switched to VESA as the graphics driver to use during the installation by passing some options to the kernel.

I used the following partitioning scheme:
/ - 10GB
/home - 5GB
/opt - 3GB
swap - 500MB

The next step then is to customize the installation and add additional software. Before that, I need configure the dual screen setup. Since VESA does not support dual screen, I need to change the driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to "intel".  However, this causes the system to hang. The workaround I followed is to use a kernel from Karmic(2.6.31-20-generic). Installing a new kernel is new to me since 10.04 uses GRUB2 and there is no longer /boot/grub/menu.lst.

The following are the initial packages I installed to get a functioning system ready for work:
*Acrobat Reader (for reading journal articles)
*Thunderbird (for email)
*Flash Plug-in (for watching great table tennis matches)
*MPlayer and gecko-mediaplayer (for listening to RJ100)
*VLC (for watching Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother)
*GYachE (for allowing me to see "invisible" people in YM)
*build-essential,qemu,nasm (for OS programming stuff)
*Subversion (for checking out source code of projects)
*vpnc (for allowing me to connect to ICS VPN)
*GVim (may favorite text editor)
*XAMPP (I use this for PHP and MySQL programming instead of the packages from Ubuntu itself)

So far, my 10.04 experience is great!

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Congratulations to my first batch of advisees

  • Richard Christiensen E. Aluning
  • Adora Alexis B. Cabuyadao
  • Mark Joseph G. Caliston
  • Axel S. Trajano 
Do your best out there!