Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Release Candidate – Installation Notes
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Released to the public on October 22 Canonical’s latest and greatest Ubuntu yet “Karmic Koala 9.10“. For many folks using a Linux distribution probably ranks up there with a visit to the dentist, but I have to say that as the kernel keeps improving in leaps and bounds the software wrapped around it can just work on the majority of hardware without issue.
Sure many folks may try it out and find out that it ‘does not work’ with their specific hardware, but compared with last years 8.10 the numbers are down with the sad exception of two particular vendors; ATI and Intel. ATI recently dropped support for much of their older hardware, but then released a new series of drivers that do support. Thankfully using the older drivers or using the open source communities versions can at least get them working, if you have problems with the more supported drivers. Intel on the other hand has basically thrust it’s middle finger up at the linux community with a blatant refusal to provide open source to allow many distributions to be able to integrate support, so for many it means booting to a broken system, and downloading proprietary drivers and praying it works. Obviously this isn’t the end of the world, but from my perspective a seriously ‘good’ reason to avoid using Intel hardware, especially if you want to use wine to run Windows games or applications, you’d do so much better with non-Intel chipsets. nVidia has the best support out of the box for most people not only linux users, but also windows users that it’s becoming a staple requirement. Don’t get me wrong, Intel does provide drivers, but do not expect them to work directly from installation. In some cases the generic drivers get installed and it works, in other cases you’re faced with non-working hardware and off to the various support forums seeking a solution. Thankfully they are available.
In my situation I decided to get a new laptop and specifically bought a Compaq CQ60 which features NO Intel or ATI hardware, simply so I could avoid any hassles. I’m pretty good at fixing these issues, but if I am spending money and the amount is equal, why buy something with hardware that will not work? So without further adieu, I release my notes on installing Ubuntu 9.10 x64 on this laptop.
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