A friend of mine just asked me for help with his new laptop. He wanted to try out Jaunty, but got stuck with a couple of show stoppers: no WIFI and no sound. The hardware is already supported in newer releases of ALSA and the Linux kernel, so 9.10 “Karmic” will probably run flawlessly with this HP out of the box. Here’s how to fix it:

• Wifi: it ships an Atheros AR9285 wireless card. From the Official Linux Wireless wiki we can see that it is supported on kernels >= 2.6.29. Jaunty comes with 2.6.28, but it is not a problem:

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

• Sound: Update ALSA. This is for the latest snapshot:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tiwai/snapshot/\
alsa-driver-unstable-snapshot.tar.bz2 -O -| tar xvj
cd alsa-driver-unstable
./configure --enable-dynamic-minors
make
sudo make install-modules
echo "options snd_hda_intel model=hp-dv5" | \
sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Problem solved. Reboot and enjoy.

Lately I’ve been wanting to buy a netbook. I’m not an impulsive guy when it comes to buying new gadgets, so I have been postponing the moment. But having an unexpensive, semi-disposable system laying around can come in quite handy.

I mention this because the time to buy is getting closer and closer, and yet I’m astonished that so little people out there are making a big fuss over the next big thing: ARM netbooks and Linux. Sure, we already have some of these out there from Skytone and Elonex -and probably others-, but those are fairly limited machines performance-wise.

I’m talking about cheap mini-laptops that can be used to surf the web, write reports and even play 720p video, all with an extremely low power consumption, 10+ hour battery life and very little heat generation. These machines are already on their way, will use newer and more powerful ARM processors and will hit the market in the following months.

I believe this is, in fact, a silent revolution that doesn’t even ripple the surface. This will change everything. And why is that? Well… for starters there is a huge market for something like this, like the sells of anything Netbook-related have been steadily showing lately. An it seems hardly possible that Microsoft will release an ARM enabled Windows XP. This means Linux will get yet another boost in market share when these machines become mainstream, although I’m pretty sure Microsoft will still claim a 90%+ share in the netbook segment. Despite this alleged 90%, the rules of the game have changed, and netbooks are not playing by Microsoft’s rules any more.

Things are changing. And with this, cheap, ubiquitous, multimedia network-enabled machines will become a reality. And those will be powered by free software, at last. Debian has been supporting ARM chips for a long time, Ubuntu does since release 9.04 and other mobile and embedded devices have a long history with Linux. And lets not forget about Android! Oh man, I can hardly wait to get my hands on one of these jewels!

It’s a revolution.  It’s quiet, but it’s happening.

Couldn’t let the day pass by without mentioning that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) has finally been released today. You’ll have lots of information elsewhere, so I won’t lose our times telling you about it.

It has been working flawlessly with my new Thinkpad since February, so I’m pretty sure it is a polished product by now.

I just wanted to note that every time a release is made, some servers seem to go down due to the overwhelming demand. It’s sort of a Download Frenzy I suppose. If you can’t find a working direct link maybe you should try downloading via BitTorrent. It’s the only way I use, anyway.

Here you have some cached links for the torrents in case you need them.

• Kubuntu Desktop CD for 64-bit PC (AMD64)
• Kubuntu Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86)
• Ubuntu Desktop CD for 64-bit PC (AMD64)
• Ubuntu Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86)
• Ubuntu Server install CD for 64-bit PC (AMD64)
• Ubuntu Server install CD for PC (Intel x86)