Last week I’d finally decided to move off from Windows on my work laptop. After the default installation off the 64 bit CD, here were some of the problems I found:

• The default Wireless drivers didn’t seem to work at all.
• The 64 bit version of the OS seemed to lack some of the softwares like Flash player and w32codecs.
• The external monitor/projecter didn’t work off the default installation.
• My development stack of LAMP had to be installed manually.
• Very basic multimedia support.

I reinstalled the laptop with the 32-bit OS instead, to get a hold of the missing software on the 64 bit version. The wireless was still down. A quick google search landed me at the following blog, which had a great step-by-step instruction on how to get ndiswrapper and the windows version of the Broadcom wireless driver to work on the laptop.
Instruction for installing the Broadcom drivers through ndiswrapper: http://vale.homelinux.net/wordpress/?p=144

To get the external display working, I followed the instructions over at Ubuntu’s community help site: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI.
The default open source drivers didn’t have support for TV-out. The instructions I followed were quite simple:

Install linux-restricted-modules and restricted-manager provied in the restricted repositories:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-generic restricted-manager
Open the restricted drivers manager included in 7.04 “System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers Manager” and select “ATI accelerated graphics driver”. This will hopefully enable fglrx in a painless way. If not, follow the instructions for Edgy.

Apart from the instructions above you’ll also have to install fglrx-control. At the shell prompt type in:

sudo apt-get install fglrx-control

After this you can access the ATI control panel by issuing the following command at the prompt.

sudo fireglcontrol

These took care of my basic necessities. Had my network and basic software installed. Being a LAMP developer, I had to get LAMP installed on the laptop. Here’s how to get it done:

apt-get install apache2
apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
apt-get install php5-cli php5-dev
apt-get install php-pear

The first two gets apache2, and the php modules installed. The next two get the php command line, php dev libraries and pear installed on the system. Next let’s get MySQL up and running:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

This installs MySQL server and the client setup. To setup the mysql libraries for PHP5, run the following:

apt-get install php5-mysql

Linux still lacks an IDE for LAMP development, so while I search the net for a suitable candidate, I guess gedit or Quanta will work fine for coding. One of the candidates in the open source area for this task is PDT, I’m yet to evaluate it.

To get all the other multimedia goodies installed on my system, I used BUMPS.

If your company has some nagging legacy web applications which refuse to work on anything other than IE, you can also install IE on Ubuntu using ies4linux. Here’s a link which shows you how do go about this:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/ies4linux

Be warned that having IE on your system legally requires that you have a valid license for Windows.

If you’re pulling out your hair wondering why the hell will some one install IE on Linux, it’s just that some nasty web-application developers make cross-browser compatible apps that work on any browser as long as it is IE!

A large number of wireless broadband services like sprint wireless and verizon wireless have sprouted with increasing trend of wireless. Also, with the advent of wireless internet hotspots, wireless internet coverage has expanded.