My brother-in-law is a struggling victim of the windows plague. But why wouldnt he be? School, work, stores, they have the general public locked in to an endless cycle of bluescreens and service packs. But two days ago Josh bought an Asus G51 to use for "play" but work mostly. He is a civil engineer and uses auto-desk [ a rather bulky, resource devouring, program] which wont run on just anything. When he told me he was buying it, me being me, the first thing i wanted to do was give it a gnu heart. This was the open door that you wait for when you dont know how to approach a rabbid windows addict, you just dont know how they will react. Now he has known me for a while and knows all about gnu/linux because of that. So it wasn't hard to talk him into a dual-boot setup with ubuntu and grub calling the shots after the last few months struggling to keep his windows "workstation" going.
Here are the G51's basic specs:
-Core 2 Duo with Centrino2 technology
-Nvidia Geforce GTX 260M CUDA 1gig
-Dolby Sound
-ExpressGate
-Lighted Keys
The desired outcome:
Expressgate [for those times you just have to im in the next four seconds]
Vista x64 [happy? and running autodesk]
Ubuntu 9.04
It came from the store with vista x64, so to save some time and headaches i just reduced the size of the windows partion, to give enough space to install Ubuntu. I decided to give windows slightly more room on the HD to allow space for his auto-desk projects.
A few other side notes, before our procedures were started we noticed that he couldn't get his wireless to work out of the box while in windows.
I used the diskmgmt.msc utility in vista to do the initial resizing to make windows happier the next time it boots [no chkdisk]. Downside is that Vista is a hog and only gave me 87gig of the 305. But ubuntu is so much smaller and can access the windows drive so it isnt even an issue. Files can be moved back and forth with no problems.
Then while in live install I used partition manager [during the installation process] and manually specified partitions with a simple layout.
Luckily on this pc the splashtop is installed on its own flash drive so that saved some time and trouble too.I let the installer do its thing and waited to see what would come of it.
Once the installer finished we were greeted in the usual way, and there it was graphics detected, and i was prompted to install version 180 of the nvidia driver. Wireless worked without a driver install, bluetooth also seemed to function although we didnt have any real way to test it. I will have to say that ubuntu has come along way since I started using it. Since Hardy 8.04.2 I havent ran into too many instances of unrecognized hardware.
To finish off the conversion I set Josh [my brother in law] up with a few snazzy themes and icons. Then I gave him the run down on the basics of getting used to the gui part and let him loose. I plan to post updates to this story as I see how the creature reacts to his new environment. But for now, its another conversion gone smoothly.
happy tuxing :)
4 comments:
Hi, I also try to install ubuntu 9 on my G51VX-X3A, but the there is no sound even though the sound icon seems active, did you run into similar situation?
actually no the user has even went on to upgrade to karmic release. Have you cranked everything up in the mixer? email me some system specifics and i may be able to help.
I also have an asus g51 JX-A1 and I´m trying to install Ubuntu 8.04, but still can get it running... do you know anay tips for intalling ubuntu in this laptop?
i would start by trying the newer version of ubuntu. And then go from there. I installed jaunty on this one and as far as then it was working fine.
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