Gateway T-1628 and Ubuntu Linux
3:21 am May 14th, 2008I posted recently about buying a new laptop — how is it working out, you may wonder?
Pretty well overall. The screen has remarkable clarity, the keyboard is comfortable, and the battery life is okay; on the other hand, the speakers are the quietest and tinniest-sounding speakers of any computer I’ve ever owned/used extensively. At 14.1″ for the screen, it’s just a little bulkier than I’d like (the 12″ iBook was a perfect size; how come computers that small now seem to be a luxury item?), and I’d prefer a slot-loading drive to the tray DVD drive it has. But overall it meets my needs, for now.
Judging by a quick Google search, I’m probably one of the first people to install Linux on this particular machine. It was a little tricky to find an install disk that would boot correctly; it’s a 64-bit machine, but the Hardy 64-bit installer had a problem with xorg and the Gutsy 64-bit disk had a problem with the installer. The Gutsy x86 disk worked fine — though I had to use the partitioner to wipe the entire disk rather than creating a partition alongside the Windows partition, since this computer came with a hidden partition with a “backup” install of Windows Vista. This seems like a particularly egregious invasion of the user’s freedom to use the computer as they wish — fortunately, blanking an entire hard drive still works!
Wireless and sound didn’t work right away; I used Ndiswrapper to install the RTL8187B Realtek driver, which I was able to download from the internet. To get sound to work, I needed to install linux-backports-modules-generic, run alsamixer and turn everything to unmuted/full volume, and reboot.
I did the installation process the day before Hardy’s official release; on release day, I used the updater to install the new release, and everything that had been working before still worked fine. I still haven’t gotten around to fixing suspend/hibernate, which didn’t work out-of-box, but I’m optimistic that I’ll get it going when I have more time to tinker.
4 Comments to “Gateway T-1628 and Ubuntu Linux”
bugmenot says:
December 8th, 2008 at 7:19 am
seriously, you offend me….
i have the same laptop, and the speakers work fine, there is just an extra volume control you must turn up. there is a Master that stays at like 80% and then theres the Front, which is the one you turn up by standard. up the master to 100% and then it should be fine. and you don’t need a 64 bit cd, just use 32 bit. also you shouldn’t have to wipe the entire partition, i dont know what you’re talking about, i shrank my vista partition and added linux to it fine.
Outline_Please says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:03 am
I have the same laptop and thinking of installing a linux flavor that actually works. Bugmenot, could you please outline everything you did? i would really appreciate it. I tried fedora but it doesn’t work.
thanks
clara says:
January 16th, 2009 at 4:38 am
bugmenot: I know about the master volume, but even turned all the way up it’s still not as loud as I’d prefer. Not a big deal though, I can use external speakers when I need to. Also you’ll see in the post that I did use the 32-bit cd and had no problems with it; I was just recording my experiences with the 64-bit disks.
Outline_Please: Do you want to dual-boot Windows, or just run Linux exclusively? I never bothered trying to get a dual-boot on that machine, but I’ve been using Ubuntu-only on the laptop (installed via the above process) and it’s been working well.
Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, & Web Consulting // Cambridge & Boston » Blog Archive » Windows Vista and Ubuntu Dual-Boot (Gateway T-1628; resolving install error 0×80070017) says:
March 12th, 2009 at 5:28 am
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