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Hey, I am back. Now with Linux

Posted on April 14th, 2008.

Hello guys. This is my new post after about five months. Oh my God! It seems that I write a post in five months. What a rate! Honestly speaking, I don’t know where my blogging’s passions have gone. Maybe it is because stress in study or maybe not. Ok, whatever it is, now I am back. Hopefully, I can improve my rate of writing. Maybe once in a month. Just kidding.

Like the title said, I am back with Linux. No, I am not boycotting Windows or Microsoft! Microsoft are such a great company, who gives us (most of home computer users) such a great and user-friendly operation systems (hey, it even comes with great IE7! Who needs Firefox?) and they new version looks very great to my eyes. Unfortunately, my old printer does not want to work on Windows Vista. Canon just refused to come up with updated Vista driver for this printer. Yes, I know, it is an old printer, so what? Customers are king, right? Or nowadays not anymore? By the way, it was also my fault of buying an old used printer (Canon MPC190), just to spare some money from buying the ink. I muss keep up with technologies or just borrow my friends’ printers.

Ok, back to Linux. Now I am running openSUSE 10.3 on Compaq Presario V3000. The biggest issue was the wireless network card. Before this, I gave up installing Ubuntu because of the same issue. It is difficult to find solution for your troubles with Linux, if you couldn’t get to internet. I needed to switch to Windows XP to get access to internet looking for solution for this wireless issue. I need to save the whole webpage and restarted the system and opened it back on Linux. Not all the solutions work for me. That means, I need to switch from Linux to Windows quiet a number of times.

This guide from Jabba Rants did work great for me. I still will paste the steps below because many of links pointing to the solution don’t work. The sites are not exist anymore. Sorry Jabba, I don’t intend to steal your content.

Installation Guide

1. Insert CD and boot.
2. When you see the menu to choose which installation type you want to do, choose the regular installation, but before pressing Enter, type: “noapic irqpoll nosmp” without the quotes. Those three words should be at the bottom of the GRUB menu in the Options line. Hit Enter.
3. Go through the graphical installer. It is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. Go ahead and accept most defaults as they are. I would recommend setting up networking and everything and getting updates with a regular ethernet wired connection during the install process.
4. Once it is finished, go to YaST (Administrator Settings). Go to System and click on “Boot Loader”. Click the first item and click “Edit”. Make sure that you see “noapic irqpoll nosmp” in the Options line. If they are not there, add them.
5. While still in YaST, click on Sofware and then choose “Community Repositories”. Make sure that the main repositories as well as the nVidia and any other ones you think you might want are checked and click Finish. After they are done being set up, click on “Software Repositories” in YaST and make sure that all the repositories you selected are enabled and make sure that the “openSUSE-10.3-OSS-KDE 10.3″, which is the CD or DVD, is disabled.
6. Click on “Software Management” in YaST, and search for “nvidia” and choose “nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default” and “x11-video-nvidiaG01″ to install. Then search for “ndiswrapper” and choose it to install. Click “Accept” and let it finish the installation.
7. Google for “Dell R151517.EXE” and download that file from Dell’s download site. Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where the file was downloaded. Type: “unzip R151517.EXE”. This will probably spill files all over the place, so you might want to move that file into a directory that you can easily delete later. Once it is done unzipping, type in the following series of commands:

su -

(enter your root password)

cd /home/user/directory/where/you/unzipped/the/file/

cd DRIVER/

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

ndiswrapper -m

echo blacklist bcm43xx >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules

reboot

Now, if everything went smoothly, when your computer boots back up, you should see the nVidia logo flash across the screen right before you log in. Once you are logged in, you should be able to click on the KNetworkManager icon in the system tray and see your wireless networks. If you didn’t see the nVidia logo before you logged in, edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root and find the word ‘nv’ and change it to ‘nvidia’ and restart the X Server or reboot again. Hopefully someone will be helped by this guide and not have to go through the many hours of trial and error to get this notebook working nicely with Linux.

I didn’t use the Dell R151517.EXE file. The contents of the files are just the same like my Broadcom wireless network card driver for my laptop SP36684A.exe. Wireless and Graphic card issues are now settled. Now I am having problem with my sound card.

Ok, till then. Sayonara!

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