Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

I got my Vista to download the iso ... don't you think Vista is good for nothing. md5 to check sum and burned the image onto a CD-R. All by following Ubuntu's instructions which are usually are OKAY if you can find them. I find their site generally pretty hard to navigate.

My rig is a dinosaur machine with two harddrives with Ubuntu 7.10 running pretty well from the smaller 40GB drive. My whopping 160GB drive was pretty much unmolested. (The other earlier post using Update to update from 7.10 to 8.04 was for another machine all together. This is done via a CD-R burned LiveCD installation)

wifi using Realtek 8180, resolved.

So I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04 onto my whopping 160GB drive and see what happens. The installation takes about 15 minutes and it all went well except I still can't get my wifi works out of the box. My cheapo wifi PCI card uses realtek 8180 chipset and never worked out of the box. I was hoping the ndiswrapper (Windows wireless driver program) would be automagically installed in 8.04 to make life less painful. Alas, life is not a bed of roses when it comes to Linux. And how the hell am I going to get the 7.10 ndiswrapper back....I really forgot how I found this one out even though it was only yesterday. It's via Synaptic manager of course. I just need to put the LiveCD into the drive and let it be a source and then search for the string "ndis". Then installed the packages from the CD. I mounted my 40GB drive and find the INF file I downloaded from way back when I did Ubuntu 7.10 and copy it to my drive (what was I thinking? I could have just installed the INF from there why did the copy and paste). I then run the Windows wireless driver program from the System Administration menu and it's almost painless. I got my network connection back. Once I got the Internet under my thumb, I rule.

GRUB error 18, resolved.

Well things went kind of downhill and straight to hell when I tried to get the ATI graphics driver to work somewhat better like in 7.10. For some peculiar reason, after a couple of add and remove, my system or actually GRUB can't even boot to 8.04 nor 7.10 any more. That's major.

The error was like GRUB error 18 and the system just stopped cold.

Again I somewhat forgot how to fix it ... even it's only yesterday.
OKAY I will try to recall ...

I even tried to re-install the system again. But to no avail, thank goodness it took about 15 minutes....

Okay, more Googling....

Boot up from the LiveCd again,
get to the terminal
type some crap like
>sudo grub
grub>root (hd0,0)
grub>setup (hd0,0)
grub>quit

then reboot system
and magically, now grub gives me back my 7.10 boot menu.

But I am not happy with 7.10. I was but once you got it, you wanted to be at 8.04...
So more trial and error and more Google.

I tried to change hd0 to hd1 but again no good. I tried to re-install the system again, no good.

OKAY, re-installed again, but this time after some Google and some insights or sixth sense actually, when in partitioning, I clicked on the advance button, and changed the default hd0 to hda from the drop down and went through the rest of the 15 minutes installation process. Reboot, now I am in business, the GRUB menu now gives me the option of picking 8.04. I have yet to fully understand the mistake I've made and how I actually got it corrected. My primary drive is the hda where the boot takes place. My second drive is where 8.04 is. So far after 24 hours, a half dozen reboots, GRUB is still working properly so I guess I must have fixed the problem.

Now I have to go on solve the display problem...the thread I got for it didn't quite help.

UPDATE 4/27/2007

Display, nvidia-glx-new, resolved.

At least I got my display back to 7.10 performance.
The nvida-glx-new package was I guess never installed. Under System, Administration, Hardware drivers, the nvidia-new was marked enabled, but not used. It's really the pinnacle of message, what the hell is it trying to tell you? I have no idea. I googled a bit, and some easy but doesn't make sense solution was like unmark to disable. Reboot. Then mark enable. I tried a few times wouldn't do anything. And I even monkeyed with Synaptic manager to change the Repository to Other and let the manager find the fastest servers for download. But no go. BUT, the strangest thing happened. After I actually shut it down, and boot up, and marked it enable, actually the system went to download the package nvidia-glx-new this time and got the sucker installed. And now with a system reboot, I got my 1600x1000 back at least where it was. I could never get my 1680x1050 back and I read maybe I have to use the non-dvi plug for the HP w2207. So I am always 400 pixels short.
UPDATE: 4/28/08
Finally I unplugged the dvi cable and used the vga cable instead. And guess what, I got my 1680x1050 pixel back but the refresh rate is either 50 or 51hz, that's a bit mind boggling, why the 1 hz difference? The ideal 60hz is unattainable as of now. The DVI is supposed to give better graphics but I can't tell the difference. So I will stick with the VGA cable.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: 4/30/2008
Via Add/Remove, I got the Nvidia server and the System Info. And System Info I can configure using the Nvidia Server to make the display on spec, that is 1680x1050 @60hz. But I have the impression that it might not be very stable. Why, because I was doing that in Ubuntu 7.10 and for some inexplicable reason, or things I don't know enough I call inexplicable, when I changed it to 1680x1050@60hz, between users, the screen blackout. I haven't do a few reboots in 8.04 so I don't know if the setting will stay and reliable, but it's doable.
YET STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: 5/5/2008
Seems like the 1680x1050 @60hz is sticking just fine in Hardy Heron. Well, I haven't tested it when I switch between users as I don't have any other users setup there.
YET YET STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: 8/2/08
the 1680x1050 @60mhz is doable but you have to use the VGA plug. The DVI plug wouldn't work. That's my experience with my LCD monitor. That's not a new piece of information, just to recap.
YET YET STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: 3/11/09
The video card is GeForce FX 5500 with 128MB, the DVI just max out at 1600x1000


First impressions
The fonts look better from Firefox 3 in Hardy Heron, actually much better, much better.
Even got yahoo! blog display correctly.
You still need to download Gstreamer extra plugins to simply play mp3.