Installing Ubuntu 8.04 on the HP G6031EA laptop
Posted by DanielRM on June 30, 2008
I replaced my old laptop in the December of last year and got quite a nice new one, the HP G6031EA. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled but, and let’s be honest, Vista’s nothing more than a piece of bloatware, as shown by the fact that uninstalling things to the point where it was practically non-functional still left me with 30 gigs of used space going somewhere, leaving me wondering where best to hire a hitman to take out Steve Ballmer.
Hence I immediately tried switching to Ubuntu, which I’d had a terrible time with on my old laptop as it had, after all, served pretty much every function on the planet and lasted me for four years with only a puny 192MB of RAM.
The G6031 is a nice little piece of kit: a dual-core AMD processor clocked at 1.7GHz per core, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and up to 512MB integrated graphics. All in all, not a bad little performer for the £400 I picked it up for, although obviously a bit puny compared to some laptops you can get nowadays.
The first time I tried Ubuntu on it we were still around the 7.10 mark, Gutsy Gibbon, and I had various issues which I was unable to sort out. Since then we’ve arrived at 8.04, Hardy Heron, and I’m glad to say it now works like a dream.
Installation works as standard; pop in a Live or Alternate Install CD, mess about a bit with the configuration and off you go.
There might be a bit of a problem when booting either the LiveCD or your newly-installed system, though; I experienced severe graphical corruption the first few times, which I sorted by adding ‘noapic nolapic noacpi’ to the boot options in GRUB or on the LiveCD. Obviously this had disadvantages, but I’ve found recently that it no longer seems to require it, even from a LiveCD which can’t be affected by the updated system, so YMMV.
Upon booting your new installation, you’ll find two issues – a complete lack of 3D acceleration and a non-functioning wireless card.
The 3D acceleration is easily solved, as it’s simply a case of switching from the default, open-source nv driver to the proprietary one; simply go into the Restricted Drivers Manager and install the suggested driver; alternatively, if you don’t for some odd reason have or use Jockey, the Restricted Drivers Manager, then simply install the nvidia-glx-new package, which is the same driver.
Making a copy of your xorg.conf is highly advised prior to doing that, however!
You can make a backup by typing the following command in to a terminal, giving your user account password when prompted:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old
If something goes wrong, then you can simply enter the following command into the terminal to restore it, whereupon you have but to reboot (or restart your Xserver – your choice) to apply the change:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Now that the graphics driver is sorted out, on to the considerably bigger problem that is the lack of wireless!
Having tried every solution given on the Internet and then a few of my own, I can safely say that this is a right PITA which simply will not yield to anything applied.
Thankfully, there is an easy solution, but it requires that you already have Internet access in some way – and that is to update to the 2.6.25-19 kernel, although versions after that work fine as well. These aren’t included in the stable repositories, so you’ll have to enable the Hardy Proposed repository in Software Sources.
This should result in the wireless card working correctly but, as with all things, YMMV.
There are some issues left to sort out. In particular the proprietary Nvidia driver seems to have problems dropping from X to the console, resulting in an unusable black or flickering screen; although X can be brought up again by pressing Alt-F7, this won’t work in cases where X isn’t already running, thus forcing you to reboot to regain control over your laptop.
The console works with the open-source nv driver, although I did notice a bit of flickering with that one.
There are also a few problems with suspend and hibernate functions; whether they work or not is a bit hit and miss, I’m afraid.
Other than these problems, though, it really is a very nice laptop for running Ubuntu, and works well enough for me.
