Ubuntu 5.10 on the IBM Thinkpad R51

On another partition, I popped Ubuntu 5.10 on the Thinkpad R51. I figured I need to eat some of my own dogfood, and give it more use. Here are some notes:

  • Installation went smoothly, installing side-by-side with FreeBSD. It however, didn’t write to GRUB that FreeBSD actually exists, and use that as an option for booting. It also, didn’t give me an option (or I missed it?) to say if I didn’t want it to install the bootloader. Anyways, in /boot/grub/menu.lst, add:

title FreeBSD
root (hd0,0,a)
kernel /boot/loader

  • My WiFi (ipw2100) actually just works. Ubuntu includes the firmware it’d seem, which explains why RMS doesn’t think Ubuntu is free software.
  • 96.9MB of updates were waiting for me the moment I logged into GNOME. The kernel update broke around 50%, but I was amazed to see it resume the download from there. Is this some dpkg/apt cleverness that we could use in rpm/yum?
  • I tried to install something (gforge-*), and apt barfed. I presume this is how people mentioned RPM hell and what not… There exists APT hell too, folk.

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