Ubuntu 9.04 on HP4325us laptop

I still have a 6-1/2 year old HP4325us Athlon XP laptop that, like a Timex watch, just keeps on ticking. Just for grins, I replaced the 4200RPM 40GB hard drive with a 160GB 5400RPM PATA drive (PATA laptop drives are rapidly fading from existence), and installed Ubuntu 9.04. Normally I’m more of a Red Hat Fedora user, but wanted to try Ubuntu to see what I thought about it, and to see if it could figure out the Broadcom based Linksys WPC54gs pcmcia card.

Using the custom partition manager on the Ubuntu install CD, I partitioned the disk as follows:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006370b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 10212 81923467+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 10213 19136 71682030 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 19137 19457 2578432+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

The small boot partition really isn’t necessary by today’s standards, old habits die hard.

Hardware:

Output of /sbin/lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device cab0 (rev 13)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc U1/A3 AGP Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 01)
00:02.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]
00:08.0 Modem: ALi Corporation Intel 537 [M5457 AC-Link Modem]
00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6912 Cardbus Controller
00:10.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4)
00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 PMU
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility U1

lspci -vnn output for the Linksys WPC54gs 802.11 wifi card
2:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4318] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Linksys Device [1737:0049]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
Memory at 44000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: ssb

The trick to get this to work is:

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

when you are asked in the installation dialog “Fetch and install firmware?” answer “Yes” (just press “Enter)

then reboot. A signal-strength icon should appear on the top menu bar, selecting that will allow you to select and configure your network.

I also installed wpasupplicant to deal with the wpa2 settings, but I’m not sure this was necessary.

Having used Red Hat variations for over a decade, I’m more accustomed to their notion of where configuration files belong. Ubuntu takes some time to adapt to from an administration standpoint. From a user’s standpoint, its easy to find and install a wide variety of free applications, and gnome and presumably KDE are pretty much the same no matter whether its Ubuntu or Fedora underneath.

I put the old hard drive into an external USB case and copied the old XP partition to the new one via:

dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda1 bs=4096

This took many, many, hours to copy 14GB of data via USB-1. The lack of USB-2.0 on this machine has always been my primary complaint. I never got the machine to boot XP properly this way, so I started over by using Acronis to copy the old disk to the new one first.  Then I re-installed Ubuntu 9.04. Everything seems to work quite well, and it boots very quickly.