Ubuntu Edgy on my M60
This weekend I made a simple mistake that nuked my laptop OS. Long story that I am not going to get into at the moment, let me just say that I really want a MacBook at this point. In the interim though, I guess that I am going back to running Linux on my laptop. There are a lot of issues with getting this to work so I am going to use this post to track my trials and tribulations. This will be helpful when my FS gets corrupted like it always does and I have to go through this again…
Wireless
In order to get wireless working on my laptop I need to do a couple of things. My laptop has a Dell True Mobile 1300 card in it. This requires ndiswrapper to work. So, to start with I put the bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.inf files onto a USB drive from my windows in stall. Next up, go into /etc/modprobe.d and add a blacklist for the bcm43xx diver. Load the windows driver into ndiswrapper and that is about it.
Video
Although the system comes up in full resolution from the start, it is not using the Nvidia binary drivers so all the cool features of the card are not available. First install the linux-restricted-modules-generic module. Next up install nvidia-glx.
Issue the command sudo nvidia-xconfig and this should get you a very basic configuration for this card. Restart X, and you will see an nvidia splash screen if all is well. Next we need to edit the Xorg.conf file to get a good configuration. This is a bit more work. Below are the sections that I changed to get multiple monitors working, etc. This is not a complete Xorg.conf file!
Section “Module”
Load “glx”
EndSection
Section “Device”
Identifier “NVIDIA Corporation NVIDIA Quadro FX Go700″
Driver “nvidia”
EndSection
Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Device “NVIDIA Corporation NVIDIA Quadro FX Go700″
Monitor “Generic Monitor”
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 16
Modes “1920×1200″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1920×1200″
EndSubSection
Option “NvAGP” “1″
Option “NoLogo” “true”
Option “CursorShadow” “true”
Option “TwinView” “true”
Option “SecondMonitorHorizSync” “31.5-90″
Option “SecondMonitorVertRefresh” “60″
Option “MetaModes” “1920,1220,1280×1024″
Option “TwinViewOrientation” “RightOf”
EndSection
Okay. Those are the keys. I still have to figure out how to make it pretty. I will post more about that later.