• Intro
• Prep
• Wireless
• Sound
• Compiz-Fusion

Intro

This page contains notes on installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on a Gateway ML3109 computer, a machine I bought at Best Buy for $350. I usually spend upwards of $2000 on my workstations and, in my 25+ years of computing, I've never come close to such a good deal as this laptop. My Commodore 64 cost me $400 and I thought that was a pretty good deal. The Amiga computer, which was way ahead of every other computer of the day, cost me only $1600, and I thought that was an excellent deal. But nothing beats this.

However, getting sound, wireless, and a 3D desktop environment working was not trivial and took me a few hours. My reward for that work was a truly impressive, responsive, light-weight computer that I can take anywhere and that I currently use as my main workstation. I wanted to give back to the world by helping others to configure the laptop like I did.

It doesn't look like much until I open it and start working. Then, the windowing environment flat-out outshines anything any of my coworkers or friends are using. The raw performance of the laptop is about half as good as the most expensive laptops out there and that has been sufficient to keep me from noticing any performance issues whatsoever so far.

When I go somewhere, I use the computer as a laptop. When I'm parked in my office I connect several devices to the computer, including a 20.1" screen, a back-lit Deck keyboard, a back-lit mouse, and speakers. Then, I turn off the lights, and I revel in a programming environment that is hard to beat.

I am astonished that a company can engineer such a fabulous piece of hardware and then configure it as to make it almost unusable. Am also impressed with how Ubuntu runs on the machine. I've not had any performance problems with the 3D interface, with video, music, compiling software, running virtual machines, or anything else, which is impressive given that I do so many of those things concurrently. Among the virtual machines I run (mostly Linux servers) I run a virtual machine with Windows that, for example, doesn't have any trouble with video playback.

I did replace the 512MB RAM with 2 1GB sticks. That set me back another $100 approximately. However, I needed the extra RAM only for the virtual machines. Users that don't plan on using VMs will get along fine with 512MB RAM.

Prep

After you install Ubuntu, the first thing you do should be

sudo apt-get install build-essential

You'll need that package to get everything working on this laptop.

Wireless

First, ensure that these lines exist (and are not commented out) in your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file:

blacklist r818x
blacklist r8187

Then, follow the directions for getting the wireless to work in this post. You can ignore the directions for getting the sound to work. In the next section, I provide a script that should make it much easier for you to get your sound working.

Sound

The biggest tip on how to fix sound I found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3392881

Using the information from that source and from others, I crafted a script that got sound working on my notebook computer. To get sound working, you can follow these simple steps:

1. Add this to the bottom of your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file:
   options snd-hda-intel model=STAC9200
2. Create a directory somewhere, put this file in that directory, and run the file like this:
   bash enable_sound.sh

After that, reboot and your sound should be working fine. If the sound stops working (for example, because of a kernel upgrade), just run the script again.

Compiz-Fusion

Compiz-Fusion works if you follow these steps:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=488385

But you'll need to run the last sudo apt-get install command twice in a row.