First impressions of Vista and Ubuntu

Last week I was on a business trip to the USA and decided it was finally time for me to buy a new notebook computer. Here in Japan it’s difficult to get machines with US keyboards.

My previous one was a 650 MHz Pentium III whose RAM was maxed out at 512 MB while my main desktops and servers have 2 GB or more. Lack of RAM slows down PCs much more than a slow clock speed does. People who buy entry level Vista machines equipped with only 512 MB would be better off with a sub-1 GHz CPU but a full 1 GB of RAM.

I picked a Gateway M-6750 with a 1.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, a 250 GB 3.5″ hard disk and 3 GB of RAM. It comes with a built-in microphone and webcam, very handy for Skype-addicts like me.

Every single machine at Best Buy and Circuit City that I looked at came with some form of Vista preinstalled. Microsoft sure does not want to give customers any choice whether they stick with XP. Ideally, I would have wiped off Vista and installed Windows XP on it. Until now I had kept my office a Vista-free zone, but knowing that occasionally I will needed to test some software on it, I stuck with it for the new machine.

I spent some time reconfiguring the Vista desktop to be as Windows 2000 and XP-like as possible. The constant alerts to permit some actions I had requested soon became annoying. Often a single operation results in the user having to agree two or three times. Inevitably, agreeing to anything without giving it much thought soon becomes a habit. Does Microsoft seriously believe that training users to constantly click “Allow”, “OK”, “Yes” will lead to a noticeable gain in security?

So far I have seen little reason for anyone to upgrade from Windows XP or Windows 2000 (my favourite Windows version) to Vista. Sure, there is plenty of new eye candy, but who but the makers and vendors of graphics chipsets, CPUs and RAM benefits from that? Users spent countless hours relearning the user interface and getting old application working (or replacing them). Even for upgrades from Vista to Vista Service Pack 1 there were so many land mines that Microsoft decided to hold off general availability of SP1 via Windows Update for several more months.

One of the reasons I picked this model was its large hard disk, because I was planning to also run Ubuntu. I downloaded the ISO image and burnt it to DVD using the burner software included with Vista. Ubuntu initially boots off a live DVD that includes an installer. The installation was fairly straightforward. The installer shrank the Windows NTFS partition to make space for Ubuntu. After the main installation it downloaded close to 200 updated packages and fixes, then it was all done. The default configuration took up only 2.4 GB of disk space.

I was impressed that I can access shared folders and volumes on Windows machines from Ubuntu, as well as being able to read files in the NTFS (Windows Vista) partition on the drive.

There were two driver issues however, which I have yet to resolve [now partly resolved, see updates below!]:

  • The sound hardware is missing a driver. The loadspeaker symbol in the top right corner of the desktop is showing disabled and I can’t get sound output on the builtin speakers.
  • The builtin wireless card doesn’t appear to be suppported. I can only connect to the LAN and internet by using a wired connection.

In general, driver support in Ubuntu is good, but there are obviously still some rough edges. It would help if Gateway and other manufacturers were to offer pre-configured Ubuntu machines, as Dell already does.

Similar driver issues can occur on Vista. In fact, last week I was helping set up an AOpen MiniPC, which had been upgraded to Vista after a memory upgrade from 512 MB to 1 GB and it also had issues with its wireless, which wasn’t supported until a couple of Windows Update runs.

I think Linux and in particular Ubuntu will become an increasingly serious challenger to Microsoft’s de-facto monopoly on the desktop and not before time.

Update, 2008-03-14:
Ubuntu 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”, released in October 2007) detects the sound hardware on this Intel chipset, but there doesn’t seem to be a driver for it yet. When I enter ” lspci -v” at the shell prompt, it lists this:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 0380
Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 22
Memory at fa500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [60] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
Capabilities: [70] Express Unknown type IRQ 0

I checked the sound drivers for Intel chips listed at http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Intel and it appears the ICH8 chipset is not supported yet.

Update, 2008-03-18:
The Marvell TOPDOG wireless adapter is now working with Ubuntu, by following the advice given by others and installing the Windows 2000/XP drivers for the hardware using ndiswrapper. I had first tried the Vista driver, but had no luck with that. The Ndiswrapper project page on SourceForge specifically recommended to avoid Vista drivers and use Windows 2000 or XP NDIS drivers. For PCI device ID 11AB:2A08 you need the NetMW14x.inf file which references the two driver files NetMW143.sys (for Windows 2000) and NetMW145.sys (for Windows XP).

The following threads and instructions proved very helpful, please read them both if you have the same problem as I did:

  1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper
  2. http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-575785.html

Here is what I did after installing the Ndiswrapper software and copying over the Windows drivers from a Windows machine where I had run the installer:

$ sudo ndiswrapper -i NetMW14x.inf
installing netmw14x …
$ sudo ndiswrapper -a 11ab:2a08 netmw14x
WARNING: Driver ‘netmw14x’ will be used for ’11AB:2A08′
This is safe _only_ if driver netmw14x is meant for chip in device 11AB:2A08
$ sudo ndiswrapper -l
netmw14x : driver installed
device (11AB:2A08) present

After that I followed the instructions for Configuring Wireless Network Settings. Voila! Wireless network connectivity under Ubuntu anywhere in the building!

Update, 2008-04-16:
Drew’s advice on how to get sound working did the trick for me too: I can now use the audio on my Gateway M-6750. I ran this as he suggested:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic

and restarted the machine. Thanks, Drew!

12 thoughts on “First impressions of Vista and Ubuntu

  1. good read, could i just say, with all due respect, if you had installed the Vista from a “vanilla” CD the same way you have with your Ubuntu CD, i’m willing to bet, that the Wifi Card or at least 2 other drivers might not have worked. Not a criticism, however its a perosnal IRK, because people will compare a Windows OS built to work on thier PC, with a version of Linux they download, and expect it to just work. its not really apples and oranges.. Yes i hear the argument, it should just work, but the reason your vista install “just worked” is because someone at gateway crafted it this way.

    Maoning aside, i’m sure a trip to google or ubuntuforums.org will revel how to get your hardware working..

  2. >It would help if Gateway and other manufacturers
    >were to offer pre-configured Ubuntu machines, as
    >Dell already does.

    It would help more if the actual hardware manufacturers created and released drivers for Linux, rather than relying on the Linux community to guess at the hardware and hack out a solution for every new setup.

    With the growth of Linux, however, this will be less and less of an issue as time moves on.

  3. I bought a Dell-Ubuntu desktop last summer. I wanted to support a major vendor selling Linux and I wanted to encourage Linux compatible hardware. Dollars in the market place speak louder than forum rants. Dell has to buy Linux-friendly components.

  4. I’ve tried many a distro for Gateway laptops. So far Mespis it the winner for the newest machines. Mepis leaves Ubu in the dust…

  5. Hello Dave field,

    good point on pointing out that one install was customized, the other generic. Last time I bought a Windows XP machine and installed a different (non-OEM) Windows version on it I also had to install a whole set of drivers that came with the original OS, in order to make sure all hardware was recognized.

  6. Hello Ridgeland,

    I agree with you about supporting suppliers that sell Linux-based hardware. I have three Dells in current use and would have bought a Linux-based Dell, except for two reasons:

    1) Dell Japan does not offer English versions of their products for the Japanese domestic market. They do not sell notebooks or desktops with English keyboards or Windows PCs preinstalled with English versions of Windows for that matter.

    2) My trip to the US was brief and the delivery time would have meant I would have been back in Japan by the time the computer arrived (I checked on their website). I could not have picked up the Dell in a store, as I did with the Gateway, which is a pity.

  7. Ubuntu next release will probably support
    your sound card as the intel hd audio support will be provided in the kernel and for your wifi if it is intel it will work in the next release but if it is broadcom u have to use ndiswrapper.

  8. sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic

    and then a restart solved my problems with the sound on this exact same laptop. Thank you so much for the wifi card instructions. I now have this laptop running Linux Mint 4.0 KDE edition with full sound and wifi!

  9. yes but with our m6750’s ubuntu 64 bit does NOT want to cooperate. Either with the onboard WIFI marvell top dog as NONE of the workarounds will work with 64 bit. also my um 175 usb modem with ppp wireless broadband will not work. even with the usb_modeswitch and all the tricks. there are workarounds for the amd 64 system as they are backwards compatible. but our intel core 2 duos? forget it.

  10. lonestar,

    were you trying to use ndiswrapper with a 64-bit Windows driver or with 32 bit? A preliminary Google search suggests that you can’t combine 32-bit Windows drivers with 64-bit ndiswrapper.

  11. Pingback: Marvell MC85 with NdisWrapper on Ubuntu 9.10

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