Installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on Dell Inspiron E1505 (6400)

In a previous article , I have described my installation notes for install Ubunty Edgy on my Dell Inspiron E1505 (Inspiron 6400) Laptop. Today I decided to install Ubuntu Fiesty (7.04) on that laptop to get all the latest upgrades. Here are my installation notes:

A quick note about important configuration elements of my laptop: 128MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1300 HyperMemory Card, Dell wireless 1390 card, and Integrate sound card.

Most Imp: Use the alternate install CD to install the ubuntu feisty on your laptop. Feisty standard desktop CD fails to configure the graphics card, and hence is not a good option.

Installation is pretty much similar to the Ubuntu Edgy install. Everything goes smooth with the alternate install CD, except ATI X1300 (X windows) configuration and wireless card configuration. So those two will be the focus of this article. Sound card works out of the box, so nothing fancy required for that.

Display Driver for ATI X1300

After the installation reboot your laptop, and login into the system using text mode. Then do the following:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20-15-generic
sudo depmod -a
sudo aticonfig --initial 
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

Also add the following line /etc/modules:

fglrx

You can either reboot after that or you can run following commands to get the graphical interface:

sudo modprobe fglrx
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

and you should be all set :)

Dell Wireless 1390 Card

Similar to ubuntu edgy, first remove bcm43xx driver by doing following:

sudo rmmod bcm43xx

and then add following line in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

blacklist bcm43xx

Now download the wireless card windows driver (either from your driver CD, or from the dell website). Unzip the .exe file - you should see a DRIVER directory with bcmwl5.inf file. Use the following steps to configure it:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
sudo ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmwl5.inf
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

You are done. Now you should be able to go to System->Administration->Network and configure your wireless card.