Pedagogical Posturing

My implementation of Ubuntu 8.04 on my Toshiba Satellite laptop has been trouble-free. On startup, I get the opportunity to boot to Ubuntu (the default) or Windows Vista. The Ubuntu startup is much faster than the Windows and is the ideal solution if I’m mainly wanting to connect to the Internet and don’t have any Windows-specific things to do. It’s the best of both worlds.

The only glitch has been that the drivers for making use of the graphics card (a Mobility Radeon X1600) were missing and so I couldn’t make use of the cool visual specific effects. However, I located the right package on the Internet (xorg-driver-fglrx) and used the Synaptic Package Manager to download and install it. Even after rebooting the system however, I still had to go to Hardware Drivers (under Administration) and check a box to activate the driver (it doesn’t happen by default). The following message also appears:

Proprietary drivers do not have public source code that Ubuntu developers are free to modify. They represent a risk to you because they are only available on the types of computer chosen by the manufacturer, and security updates to them depend solely on the responsiveness of the manufacturer. Ubuntu cannot fix or improve these drivers.

So be it. The driver by the way comes from that champion of proprietary software, namely Microsoft Corp., which is not surprising given that Toshiba and Microsoft are in alliance. They have an agreement that some version of Microsoft Windows will be installed on a Toshiba laptop whether the user wants it or not. I’ve yet to test out the Bluetooth capabilities and so I’m currently downloading what’s called Kinputwizard, that has a five star rating and is promoted as “the KDE Bluetooth Framework that provides several easy tools to be used with Bluetooth devices”. I’ll report on the success, or failure, of the software in a moment as I try to connect my Nokia N73 to it … update … well, the immediate result is failure, but I may need to reboot the laptop so I’ll postpone judgement for the moment. I ‘m happy enough that the visual effects have been enabled.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: driver, radeon, ubuntu