As you have noticed, installing Ubuntu 11.10 directly on the Toshiba L745D/P745D (A6-3400M) is not possible. There are a few problems that you must first resolve. First of all, the maximum amount of partitions is used – 4. Next, the AMD 6520g video card is not supported by the open source driver. And lastly there are some BIOS bugs that you must work around. Fortunately there is a work around for each problem and below you will find the steps required to get your notebook up and running with Ubuntu.
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Category Archives: Linux
How to install Ubuntu 11.10 on the Toshiba L745D/P745D
How To Set-Up Soft RAID (dmraid) in Linux Mint 6 (Felicia)
There are a countless number of dmraid tutorials on the internet that are over complicated and that do not apply to Linux Mint 6 (Felicia). Here I will show you in a few easy steps how to set-up dmraid using the Linux Mint 6 Live CD without any unnessessary frustration. The basis of my tutorial is the Ubuntu dmraid documentation and assumes that you are setting up RAID 0 or 1.
CheckGmail, Linux’s Blackberry
CheckGmail is the Blackberry of the Linux world that relatively is still unknown to most Linux users. Basically, CheckGmail is a task bar Gmail notifier primarily developed by Owen Marshall that makes checking email a task that doesn’t even require for you to actually check your mail most of the time. A click within CheckGmail is all that is needed. If for some reason you are wondering, CheckGmail works with the best and biggest email service – Gmail. The great thing about Gmail is that it works with any POP3 server, allowing you to consolidate your email accounts. You can even check your email on Gmail hosted domains and run multiple instances of CheckGmail if you have multiple Gmail accounts. Once you learn about this great application you will have another reason to switch to Linux. If you are already are on the Linux platform, you will probably install it after reading this review.
How To Install Ubuntu 8.04 (9.10) On The Asus M50Sv-A1
Almost all of the hardware on the Asus M50Sv-A1 works out of the box after Ubuntu’s installation is complete. There are none the less a few tweaks that are needed to be performed and few drivers that are needed to be installed. The screens brightness can’t be increased, the Nvidia driver is not installed, the webcam driver is not installed, the fingerprint reader driver is not installed, the email LED is non-functional, the microphone is not enabled by default, the hard drive has a firmware glitch, and the speakers don’t mute when the headphones are plugged in. This short installation tutorial is intended to save you the time and grief associated with searching for each particular solution on the internet.
Comments in green reflect the changes required in Ubuntu 9.10.
Linux Mint 4.0 (Daryna) – The Best Beginner Distro
One of the best things about Linux is all the different flavors that you can get in – Mint is one of my favorites. Based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 7.10, Linux Mint 4.0 (download) takes Canonical’s prodigy and makes it even better. And if you thought Ubuntu providing everything out of the box was impressive, Linux Mint provides everything out of the net. In addition to that, Linux Mint developers improved the usability by changing the menus and desktop layout. On top of that they added a software portal that makes installing the your software faster and easier. All of this put together brings about the finest beginner distro available to date.
BMPx – Hotter Than Your Average Media Player
After trying almost every audio media player out there for Linux, I finally found the most versatile and user friendly one – BMPx. What especially won me over about BMPx was the user interface. It is intuitive and organized with almost no settings to configure and no menus to get lost in. This is thanks to the fact that BMPx is fresh and it’s not trying to throw in a hundred useless features like the competition. It gets better, BMPx gives you 7 music sources: Shoutcast, Icecast, MP3′s, Podcast’s, Last.fm, audio CD’s and Jamendo. BMPx stands for Beep Media Player experimental and it is mainly coded by Milosz Derezynski. It’s an evolution of the previous Beep Media Player which was based on XMMS and Xine, now BMPx is all original and gstreamer based. You can download BMPx from its’ official home page and compile it yourself. If your distro is Debian based you are in luck, you can download the package from getdeb.net. I wouldn’t recommend downloading it from the universal repository as it will give you an older version of the player. To use it you will also need the appropriate codecs. You can download the individual gstreamer codec packages, but the easiest thing to do if you are using Ubuntu is to download the restricted extras package using “sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras”. Finally, on to my review!
OK, so Linux isn’t pefect
My previous post might have been a bit misleading as Linux is not perfect and it isn’t without its’ hiccups. The fact that the Linux OS has not yet become large enough to get support from most hardware manufacturer’s and game developer’s is Linux’s biggest problem at the moment. This doesn’t mean that there’s absolutely no official hardware and software support. If you have a piece of hardware that is intended to be used by business’s you might even have an official driver released by the manufacturer as Linux is somewhat popular with big business. And there are a handful of commercial games available for Linux that are natively supported. None the less, official hardware and game support is far and between, but luckily home grown support is as big as ever.
Kubuntu, a true Windows alternative
After I upgraded to Vista from Windows XP, my Microsoft OS experience just kept on getting systematically worse and worse. First of all, my computer (Toshiba R200) was promised to be fully Vista capable, but that was not the case as all of the 3D effects were not supported by the graphics card and a lot of the drivers were not yet available, oh well. In addition to that my processor was overburdened by the new bloated OS and my CPU fan never turned off and eventually died. After sending in my computer for service and waiting two months to get it back, I was ready to try again.
