{"id":476,"date":"2012-12-03T08:43:39","date_gmt":"2012-12-03T16:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blt.homenet.org\/wordpress\/?p=476"},"modified":"2012-12-29T14:15:55","modified_gmt":"2012-12-29T22:15:55","slug":"installing-ubuntu-12-10-on-dell-xps-m1730-laptop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/?p=476","title":{"rendered":"Installing Ubuntu 12.10 on Dell XPS M1730 Laptop"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve set out and installed a full working version of Ubuntu 12.10 on my Dell XPS M1730.<\/p>\n

To kick things off my keyboard died on the laptop which makes it impossible to do anything during boot up.\u00a0 After a lot of work trying to get it working again, I gave up and bought a cheap USB keyboard.<\/p>\n

I started out by having my computer setup with a RAID 0 with one master partition running Windows 7 64-bit.\u00a0 After many failed attempts at getting the hard drive partitions setup for Ubuntu I undid the RAID which wiped out windows 7.\u00a0 I’ll have to re-install Windows 7 hopefully in a dual boot at a later time.<\/p>\n

Once the partitions were wiped out I used a USB boot version of Gparted to setup the partitions\u00a0 as noted in link<\/a>, but I made boot partition bigger after reading a few other articles (besides the size is so small it doesn’t really matter)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
\u00a0<\/caption>\n
Boot<\/td>\nExt4<\/td>\n512MB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Swap<\/td>\nSwap<\/td>\n4GB (4096MB)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Home<\/td>\nExt4<\/td>\nremainder of hard drive minus 80GB for later use in Windows 7<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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 <\/p>\n

During my install of Ubuntu the screen would just flash colors.\u00a0 A quick search found that this is really common with Nvidia graphics cards.\u00a0 I combined a few options suggested on the internet by setting some custom install options.\u00a0 Press any key when the keyboard logo appears at the bottom of the screen to get to the install menu, go down to install and press F6 then add the following after the ‘–‘with a space befoe the text”nouveau.blacklist=1 vga=771″<\/p>\n

I get an error that the blacklist and 1 are invalid options, but when I try an install with just vga=771 I get the flashing colors.\u00a0 So I’m not sure what the noeveau argument is doing, but it does enough to get the display to work properly.\u00a0 I didn’t try installing with just the nouveau parameter and without the vga parameter.<\/p>\n

With that I could continue with the install.\u00a0 In the install I choose to manually select the partitions to use.\u00a0 By double clicking each partition I was able to designate the \/boot, swap, \/home specifically.<\/p>\n

After the install I restarted the computer and had the flashing colors all over again. I followed this article <\/a>to get things working.\u00a0 Right after the bios boot, but not before, hold down the shift key.\u00a0 At the grub menu select Advanced Options then the recovery mode option<\/p>\n

I selected the network option and then yes as directed.\u00a0 Some text scrolled for a while and then is seemed like things just stopped but without taking me to the GUI screen to choose root.\u00a0 I pressed up and some garbage text was displayed.\u00a0 I think I followed this by Enter and then a Ctrl-ESC.\u00a0 This caused more text to be displayed and then rather than going back to the GUI it went into Ubuntu without the flashing colors.\u00a0 From there I opened up an Xterm window and proceeded to do the commands from the link (pasted below for my information)<\/p>\n

sudo apt-get update
\nsudo apt-get upgrade
\nsudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat\/x-updates
\nsudo apt-get update
\nsudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings<\/p>\n

With that I was now have a Ubuntu setup on my Dell XPS M1730.<\/p>\n

This computer will be my media player and I don’t plan to physically use it much especially now that the keyboard is broken.\u00a0 Things that I’d like to get setup are VNC, SSH, VPN, Samba, XMBC, and iTunes (I really like the genius playlist editor).\u00a0 I’ll be posting a later blog about this. (Update: 12\/29\/2012:\u00a0 Here is the post about the media server<\/a>)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve set out and installed a full working version of Ubuntu 12.10 on my Dell XPS M1730. To kick things off my keyboard died on the laptop which makes it impossible to do anything during boot up.\u00a0 After a lot of work trying to get it working again, I gave up and bought a cheap […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[66,68,67,69,65],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-talk","tag-dell","tag-flashing-colors","tag-m1730","tag-nvidia","tag-ubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":559,"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions\/559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bt.beerprojects.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}