Monday, March 31, 2008

Linux Mint Working on Gateway T1616

The idea of the Ubuntu - Based distro Linux Mint is to make things work easier. But for the users of linux-unfriendly Gateway T1616 users, which includes me, things are always a little more complicated than it suppose to be. And Linux Mint is not an exception. Here's how I made this distro work to meet my basic requirements.
  1. Video Card This turned out to be the easiest step. After the installation, there was a notification on the taskbar asking me to use a restricted dirver. I checked that driver and Linux Mint downloaded and installed the ATI accelerated graphics driver automatically. After this, I rebooted the laptop and got the video card working perfectly.
  2. Wireless Card As I've wrote in another post, I download RTL8187B driver for Windows, unpack it. There were the rtl8187b driver for windows 98 as well as other windows versions on their own folder. I went to Daryna-Administrations-Windows Wireless Drivers , Clicked "Install", found the .ini file in the folder for the rtl8187b driver of windows 98, clicked OK. Then the wireless card started working. One thing to recommend is, the default network-manager in Linux Mint (Ubuntu) is a little dull in detecting the wireless signals. Usually it doesn't match the result of "lwlist scan". And wicd is the solution. Go to Daryna-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager. Choose Settings-Repositories, press the button New. Fill in the text area like this: URL: http://apt.wicd.net/ Distribution: gutsy Section(s): extras And then press OK. And you will be able to install wicd with synaptic (sudo aptitude install wicd). When you do that, you'll find network-manager removed automatically. Don't panic, you can install it back whenever you like. To finish the installation of wicd, you need to go to Daryna-Preference-Sessions, Press Add, Fill in name with Wicd, Command with /opt/wicd/tray.py, and fill in Comment with anything you like. Next time you start gnome, you will find wicd in the taskbar at start.
  3. Sound Card It took me quite a while to search with Google, and the result is unexpectedly simple. All you need is type the following command in a terminal:
    sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-generic
    I doubt that this works with Ubuntu , too.
  4. Webcam For the scarce of webcam application on linux, I haven't found a universal way to fully drive the built-in webcam up. But it works properly for skype 2.0 by default. Which, according to my previous test on Ubuntu, indicates that it works with kopete, too.
Having all this done, I've got this laptop working with Linux Mint. But there's still a problem. Sometime when restarted, the system stops in the middle of the whole process forever. To "restart" it, I need to turn the machine down and start it again. Do you have the same problem with Linux Mint & Gateway T1616?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am still wondering, does the "restricted drivers" let you use compiz fussion?
I am currently using Mandriva, thanks to your recommendation, but I have to admit, Ubuntu is amazing.
Thank you again, and your work is greatly appreciated.

Francisco.
Gateway t1616 user.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the information! I tried to load Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 and couldn't get sound or wireless to work.

Linux Mint 5 did the trick! No problems freezing up, but I put in 4 gb of ram before changing from Vista to Ubuntu.

Now happy to own a T-1616!

DaNmarner said...

I updated Linux Mint 4 into Ubuntu 8.04 and everything, including wireless card, is working just fine. And I also replaced all the Mint looks, such as the grub screen, booting splash, gdm theme, etc. Now I am using pure Ubuntu 8.04 on Gateway T-1616 happily. :)