Hints? Details? Have not gotten mine to work. :(

Do you have the Broadcom43xx wireless card in your laptop? If so, have a look at this ubuntuforums.org HOWTO post. It got me up and running in a few minutes.

Seeing that I was just quoted, I should clarify that that problem was with v.6.10 Edgy Eft. The current version: Feisty Fawn worked fine, but not from the live CD. I had to install it to get wireless to work. I like the latest version much better than 6.10.

For our research group, we have a server running Ubuntu with eleven RAID drives, running web server, email, lots of calculations, network backups, CVS distribution of software to mutliple locations (all tunneled through SSH), etc., etc.

When I do "uptime" it shows that it has been 187 days since the last reboot. We do upgrade patches weekly while it's sitting there running.

Pretty rock solid in my book!

Inspired by the re-emergence of this thread, I went and put 7.03 on my old Dell inspiron 8200, with an Nvidia card. It worked great! Then I wanted to triy the desktop effects. It said that I needed to enable the 3D driver, so I clicked enable. Restarted and all there is is a black screen. Same thing as 6.10. Now I have to decide whether to try and revert back to the way it was (via command line and searching in Ubuntu forums), or just reinstall, or just wait for a better version. Funny thing is, is that it all works on an old desktop with Intel integrated graphics just fine (including the desktop effects).

Ubuntu came a long way with the most recent version (Feisty). I'd installed an older version on a backup partition a couple of years ago and wasn't all that impressed. Feisty was a really easy install, and the basics (networking, web browsing, email) worked out of the box without tinkering. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm definitely going to be sticking with it.

I have fiddled with *nix shells on other people's machines for a while, so know some basics. A few years ago I decided to try install Red Hat, and fell down at the first hurdle.

Over the weekend I downloaded and burnt the ubuntu install CD on a new "spare" laptop, and it was 100% working within an hour - no fiddly linux stuff for a newbie like me to have to figure out.

It even picked up my wireless network, with the same laptop couldn't do in windows.

Now i have 2 issues to figure out:
- 1. Need to run security updates, not sure how
- 2. Need to figure out how to repartition the hdd as I got the sizes wrong during the install.

But from one afternoon of playing, I am really impressed at the "out of the box"-ness - maybe i just got lucky tho...

-- Mike

Hey Mike, congrats and well done!

1 - theres an icon in the upper right corner that looks like on orange square thingy...double click it, it will launch the updater, if you need any updates they will be there

2 - to repartition the HD, you'll probably need to download and burn another CD, I like something called Gparted http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
Once you boot from that CD, its as simple as dragging the partitions to the sizes you want and letting Gparted do its thing. Your data should be preserved.

Again, way to go!

Actually the Ubuntu Desktop CD (probably used to install) ought to have Gparted on it. If you re-boot the Ubuntu CD and use it Live without installing, try to start up Gparted, you should be able to re-partition and resize the partitions. Once done, shut down the Desktop CD, remove it, and reboot the installed Ubuntu you have on HD.

Brilliant suggestions, thanks. Will try tonight or tomorrow.

And again, 100% thumbs up to Mark Shuttleworth and all the Ubuntu developers for an excellent product, which looks slick too!

Just installed Gutsy (7.10) on an old desktop. Enabled the cube effects. Awesome! This version works perfectly on my desktop. Going to try it on my laptop tonight to see if wireless will work. So far wireless has not worked in previous versions.

As you probably know, whether Wireless works in Ubuntu (or in Linux in general) depends greatly on the type of wireless card you have. Mine is made by Intel and has excellent Linux support, so my wireless card worked almost out of the box even back in Ubuntu 6.10. If the maker of your wireless card's chipset has good Linux support (or at least made enough info available to let people make it work), you should be in luck, otherwise it will probably never work well without jumping through hoops. Would help to figure out the chipset maker of your wireless card and google for Ubuntu tricks. There may be a recipe that will make your card work with NDiswrapper or something, without too much trouble.

Please enlighten a newbie as to what "cube effects" are?

Thanks
-- Mike

I tried it multiple times with NDiswrapper and other solutions and it would never work with Edgy or Feisty. However, last night it worked! Everything finally works for me. Stayed up until 3 am playing with it. Now, I finally found a distro that works! (7.10).

Add: the wireless was an internal Intel card, however, I could not get a Linksys PC card to work either on my old laptop.

I'm not the best at explaining things. There are multiple workspaces (You set how many you want) or desktops, that you can switch to using a key combination and dragging the mouse. Each desktop is one face of a cube. When dragging the desktops with your mouse you can see the desktops in the form of a cube. When you find the one you want, you release the mouse and that is the new desktop. It's pretty neat. On my old desktop only a few effects would work, but on my laptop there are many more effects to choose from.