At first (couple days before 7.10 release) I thought I’ll install Kubuntu Feisty instead of Ubuntu Edgy I had, so I burned myself a cd image and clicked install. But that was not a good idea. My laptop with 256MB of memory, 64MB of that used by graphics card wasn’t up to the task. It stopped responding at some point and left me with broken Grub and no Linux.
So I got myself Kubuntu Gutsy alternate. Install went just fine and I was hopeful. I got loading bar for operating system that progressed faster than Edgy did. And then… black screen. No login or anything. Restarting X, once, twice…, nothing. Using terminal, my wifi card recognised out of the box, good, now if only I could get X to load.
“dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”. Choosing Vesa driver instead of VIA-s. Reboot. I have login screen, much better. After some using next reboot and no login again. Restarting X helps.
USB doesn’t work as was the case with Edgy. The magic word “irqpoll” goes into use. I have working USB, wifi and get no white lines at login screen. It just stays black for couple of seconds between initial loading and login screen.
After getting important things to work, thought I might try if I could use PortableApps on USB stick. Programs there are Windows version though I believe there’s cross-platform solution coming. But Thunderbird and Firefox both use profile folder so I tried modifying profiles.ini of both. Now I have Linux version of Thunderbird and Firefox using profile folder on USB stick. Hotmail extension for TB doen’t work at the moment and both html-validator and web developer extensions complained but everything else seems good. And despite problems some of the web developer functions I tried worked. Taking into account that both Mozilla programs probably run different version on Windows and Linux, it’s amazing how many things work.
So I’m quite satisfied with my configuration at the moment. Now if only I could have a new laptop :D.