For the sound setup, the audio out somewhat worked right out of the box. The levels were a little unpleasant but overall it was fine. The auto detection for the internal speakers and headphones worked and even the volume buttons on the keyboard were detected properly. However when you would try to mute the sound or reduce the volume all of the way it would not completely mute. You could still hear the audio.

I searched around on a fix for this but everyone said you just had to play around with your sound preferences until it worked properly. However no one would share what their configuration was. Below is what was able to setup to get it to work properly.

System - Preferences - Sound

Volume Control Preferences (on the task bar)

Volume Control

Because I am a big fan of voice chat and a heavy Skype user I needed the the microphone to be able to record my voice. It took me a while to figure out the configuration to get Skype running (see the screen shots above). The auto detection for the input jack versus the internal microphone doesn’t work, but I don’t use an external microphone all the much so it didn’t matter to me.

The first issue I had to overcome with the installation was that Ubuntu did not properly detect my MacBook’s native resolution. Which I thought wasn’t too big of a deal. I went ‘System - Preferences - Screen Resolution’ to find that my wide screen ratio (1280×800) was not available.

So I did a quick search and found that in order to support the various resolutions in Linux you need to install what is called 915resolution. I also found a nice tutorial on how to set it up. It was a pretty painless fix and then after a quick restart my laptop came up in the proper resolution.

This is the instructions that I used.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=351647

I found this service just the other day. You can setup message to be sent to your cell phone at a specified time and day to remind yourself of something.

http://www.ohdontforget.com

Booting was fine. I used GRUB and since I was single booting and there were no issues. The only problem I did have that occasionally when starting or restarting the computer the boot would fail and give me an error about an APIC clock synchronization error.

I looked into what APIC was and found that it stood for ‘Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller’ and has to do with handling and prioritizing system requests. Further research on my hardware also hinted at that APIC had to do with managing and properly utilizing both of my processor cores. The error message told me that I could run the computer without APIC enabled, but I really didn’t want to do this unless I absolutely had to.

Typically I could get around the problem by just restarting the machine manually until it would boot without kernel panicking. I was hoping that they would address this issue with an update and since I haven’t seen it in a while I think they have.

Overall booting was no big deal after the APIC issue was resolved.

There is not too much to be said here. Since I was not trying to do anything too crazy (like dual booting) the installation was a breeze. I put the CD in and then restarted and held down the ‘C’ key and it booted right up into the Ubuntu Live CD.

I took a minute to play around with the Live CD version that was running and I was very impressed with all of the things that seemed to work right off the CD. Then I hit the install button right on the desktop and and picked the basic setup options and I let it run.

It took about thirty minutes and then it was ready to go. I got into desktop and ran the updater and was already to go.

I have always hated how complex and convoluted many websites have become over the years. When trying to do even the simplest task you have to browse to this overbearing website full of ads and process and all you really want is a simple piece of information.

Well, this link resolves all of that for checking the weather. It provides current conditions and the five day forecast, without all of the clutter.

http://www.simpleweather.com

Well I decided to dive head first back into using Linux as my primary desktop. I had moved away from using Linux as a desktop solution because I got myself a new MacBook and have been exploring OSX. I chose to reformat my MacBook and try and see if I could solely use Linux as my desktop for the first time ever (instead of dual-booting).

I picked Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) as my Linux distribution simply because is quickly becoming the distribution I am most familiar because I use their server products at (and am very impressed). I thought about trying Fedora (my old favorite) but I think I would like to try out the new version on one of my desktops first.

One of the two main reasons for trying to free myself was because to this point I have never used a graphical version of Linux on modern hardware. I wanted to try out all of the cool things that Linux bring to graphical user interface (namely Compiz Fusion). The other reason for trying to free myself is because of how poor of a community participant Apple is. Apple will take the best from the Open Source community and give little to nothing back; I couldn’t take myself seriously as an Open Source enthusiast and use OSX as my primary desktop.

I am not sure if I will be able to keep Linux as my only operating system on this laptop. There are some very specific things I need to be able to do considering I use this laptop at home and work. Time will have to tell on this one. I plan to follow this article with some articles about specific issues I have had and how I have overcome them.