Firstly, I have to say its one of the easiest installs I’ve ever sat through. I installed Ubuntu from their liveCD, which was really convenient because you can play with the OS while its installing. Before I took the plunge, I read up on problems I could expect with my computer.

First and foremost, this article has helped me greatly, as have the Ubuntu forums. Pretty much everything the guy in the article went through with his Inspiron, I am experiencing. Unfortunately for me, some of the assistance links in his article are outdated, so I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far. Because, so far, this computer has been a beast to get working.

That being said, I *want* to have linux working. This is one of the only operating systems I’ve really never dealt with in any way. My computer not working is just one way for me to further my knowledge of how this weird Linux thing works. I’ve had to delve into the terminal and do all sorts of commands that I don’t understand. Of course, in most of these instances, I just copy the code I’m given verbatim and it seems to work, but yeah; I’m learning slowly. (Note: the links below worked on my Dell Inspiron 9100 with an install of Ubuntu Edgy 6.10)

The OS installed with only one hitch – after installing, it was supposed to restart itself. The computer hung, so I restarted manually and the computer booted up fine. So, awesome, I thought. I have Linux! Yay! But no, the first problem quickly presented itself. Like the article I was guiding from, my wireless wasn’t working at all. Turns out, its a problem with the card and the drivers. After trying numerous methods to get it working, all of which I found were outdated, I stumbled upon the method here, and it worked! Apparently, the problem is so widespread that a tool has been specifically written to *make these cards work with Linux*. But every time I restarted my computer I had to re-initialize the drivers. This is apparently because of some weird bug on computers that have more than 1GB of memory. Crazy. That wouldn’t do.
I reinstalled the OS from scratch (much easier than windows!) and started fresh from the steps I knew worked, and viola, wireless and WPA.

The next hurdle is getting the sound card to work. I’ll write about that once I’ve experienced it