elberon5.com

ubuntu fun w/nvidia + beryl

Posted by elberon5 Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:16:00 GMT

Uh. What gives? Thought this was a asp.net blog? I decided I want to use something different for playing around with Ruby and Rails. So I decided to go with ubuntu. It's a free Linux distribution that's got a lot of buzz around it lately.

Here's what I had and what I did to get started. I had an extra hard disk sitting in my pc that I wasn't using. I strongly suggest this if you don't want to risk messing with your windows installation. This is about the only requirement other than an internet connection. The first thing you need to do is get the ubuntu installation and burn it to a CD. You can get the file here. Next boot your PC to the CD. You'll be able to play around with ubuntu before you even install it. This is cool, you'll actually see if your drivers are all available by default. This version booted definitely runs slower than the actual install, don't be discouraged. If it looks good, install it. It will automatically put the GRUB boot loader on your system so you can get into ubuntu or windows.

Now for the cool stuff. If you get your 3d video card working right you have to attempt to install this - Beryl Here's a video of it in action.

I learned a lot about linux in the 10 hours or so I dedicated to getting this all working.

1. You can switch between the cli(command line inteface) and gui(graphical user interface) quite easily. You can turn off the gui with this command - "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm". Other useful commands for this - Ctrl+Alt+F5 (switch to cli), Ctrl+Alt+F7(switch to gui), Ctrl+Alt+Backspace (reset gui).
2. "sudo" is an interesting command which i think is unique to ubuntu. You use sudo before a command that you want to run as root. Ubuntu doesn't have a root user that can login, it uses this instead.
3. "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" - This is the configuration file. When you're fighting to get your video card working, this is the file you need to get into.
4. "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" - This is the command you use to reset the video driver when you can figure out how to use a text editor for xorg.conf in the cli.
5. System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager - This is where you install and uninstall packages.
   
   

   Once I get ruby and rails running on ubuntu i'll throw up another post. about that.