Ubuntu 7.10 installation on a Dell Vostro 1700

Introduction

Having just bought a Dell Vostro 1700 I thought I might give a little contribution to the Linux community sharing my experience. First of all, let me point out that I am by no means an advanced user. Thus, I'm not gonna be of any help if you need further informations: please head towards your Ubuntu community of choice and go ask for advice on there.

You may download the .iso from this page. Try using a .torrent so that you don't waste bandwidth.

Initial set-up

My laptop came with two separate hard drives, and pre-installed Windows Vista Home Basic. Since I wanted to enable dual-booting and I didn't like all the randomware shipped with my computer, I did some work with GParted to sort my partitions out.

To begin, I created an extended partition of 20 GB in which I placed an ext2 partition of 512 MB (the /boot partition), a lixux-swap partition of 1 GB and another ext2 partition (for the /) to fill the space left. Right next to this extended partition I placed a 30 GB NTFS partition, for Windows Vista installation. In order to fill the hard disk, I made the remaining space into a FAT32 partition.

The second hard disk was formatted as a single FAT32 partition, making it accessible from both Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista.

Installation

First of all I did the installation of Windows Vista in its NTFS partition. It's important that you do your Windows installation before the one of Ubuntu, or it will have your GRUB bypassed everytime you boot the system, making it impossible to load Ubuntu instead of Vista.

After having completed the installation process of Vista, I got back to the Ubuntu CD and rebooted the system with it.

At the Live CD initial boot screen I moved the cursor down to Safe video mode, because I had read about some issues regarding nVidia cards. Everything went smoothly and I got logged on.

I double-clicked on the Install icon on my desktop and went through the process of setting the language, the time zone and the keyboard mapping.

After that, I choosed the manual partitioning, in order to mount my /boot and / folders in the proper partitions. From here, the installation runs smoothly up until it's done.

After the installation

My monitor was already set to the correct 1440x900 resolution. In order to get my nVidia GeForce 8400M GS work, I only had to install the packet nvidia-glx-new. I tried to enable the visual enhancements and they were working absolutely fine.

I only got one major issue: the soundcard wasn't detected at all by the system. Here are a few outputs I got while probing my computer:

user@user-desktop:~$ cat /proc/asound/cards

		--- no soundcards ---

		user@user-desktop:~$ lspci | grep Audio

		00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)

		user@user-desktop:~$ alsamixer

		alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

		user@user-desktop:~$ alsaconf

		bash: alsaconf: command not found

I manage to easily solve this annoying issue in five minutes, following this step-by-step guide (in Italian). I guess there's a similar guide in English as well, anyway I think you should be able to try and understand what's written, since it's mostly plain code that needs to be typed in a terminal.
I've noticed that while trying to do the third and last:

make

		sudo make install

something looked like it wasn't working. I was getting some kind or Error1, but when I restarted the system everything worked out fine and I could use:

alsamixer

in order to poke around with my sound settings. The integrated microphone is working properly too.

In short, it looks like everything works just fine out of the box, the only exceptions being the nVidia GeForce card which needs the packet nvidia-glx-new and the High Definition Audio soundcard by Intel which needs the alsa drivers and libraries to be installed.

Notes