The Tao of Walking Ridge

Sometimes the really simple stuff is what you miss as a newbie.  There was this directory called examples.  I finally thought to look in it, and it has sample files of graphic, word, and sound files.  These really come in handy after an install when you are trying to see if everything is working OK.  I downloaded Audacious, a Winamp like media player.  It hadn’t played in my last build, but in the Lenovo it played just fine.  I tested it with an .ogg file found in the examples directory.  Now I can download my mp3s.

I became so used to using ndiswrapper to try .inf Windows drivers to get the wifi cards to work, imagine my surprise when the internal wifi card in my 3000 N200 Lenovo laptop card just worked!  I had the ethernet cable hooked up during the install, and it took me a couple of clicks to realize that a left click on the networking icon brought up a list of wifi routers.  Select, put in the WEP password, and it hooked up.  Just that easy.  Happiness is a machine that installs Unbuntu Hardy Heron easily.

My original inspiration was to create a laptop that would be a mobile sound studio. I installed Ubuntu studio in a bare bones build and was overwhelmed. I also preferred the Ubuntu desktop, as I use the machine for surfing and email and wordprocessing too. The email icon is useful.  Not all of the applications worked, as there were some sound card issues, not uncommon.

So I “downgraded” to a 3000 N200 Lenovo, and I love it.  Ubuntu installed easily, with some help from linlap.com.  The OSS sound drivers sounded best to me in Hydrogen (drum machine) but others made noise.  The drivers won’t allow multi tasking apparently.  A skype call worked great, but I couldn’t play Hydrogen during the call.  But for far less than $1000, in a light handy package, this will work fine for recording some, editing some, and generally having a nice remote machine.  For heavy stuff I believe that desktops are still the way to go.

I did order a USB mic preamp for it though.  Recording a single channel in great clarity will enable multitracking.  I’ve done an entire solo album one track at a time!  I’ll review the USB preamp when it arrives.

Wow.  What a sweet package.  The keyboard is great to type on.  The DVD reader/writer is smooth and quiet.  I put 3 gig of memory into it, and it is nice and handy.  At linlap.com they had a great summary of the compatibility of the 3000 N200 Lenovo computer with Linux.  The only tweak so far has been to add a one line text file named modprobe.conf that says options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo into the etc/modutils directory and the etc/ directory.  That’s it.  I created the file in Gedit (make sure to type sudo before the gedit command so that it will give you admin access to the directories.)

The Logitech quickcam webcam I had plugged in a worked.  A test call on Skype to a buddy got a “glitch free” performance.  Overall, I really like this package.  Handy, but still powerful.  The screen is a bit wider, but not so large as to be bulky to carry.

Lessons learned from my experience having a bare bones machine built vs this Lenovo.
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Unable to figure out how to install ndiswrapper to try and see if I could get my USB wifi to run, I installed Dapper from the commercial DVD that came with the book Beginning Ubuntu. The commercial DVD installed with no data errors, and Dapper Drake was much like Edgy Eft. On this new desktop, most of the applications loaded. The Evolution Mail client is quite nice.

This desktop has about a 2 ghz processor and 2 gigs of memory. With that kind of power you can run Kubuntu or Ubuntu with no problem. So far I like the Gnome desktop. Xubuntu was great for the older system, but Ubuntu is up and running in no time on this desktop.

The advantage of long term support (LTS) is clear. Dapper Drake was able to find the repositories to update and add/remove software. Edgy Eft can still be updated, but it is up to the user to fiture out how. The lts option is a great way to get settled in to an OS for the long haul. And Dapper Drake is not a bad one to get settled in with.

Linux distros are supplied in the form of iso files. These tell a cd or dvd burner what to burn. To make sure that all of the data was correctly recorded, there is an option for checking the files called checksum. Using this is highly recommended.

What I also learned is that passing checksum with one cd reader does not necessaily mean that the disk will pass checksum with a different reader. My attempted install of Kubuntu on my desktop resulted in some flaky behavior and errors. I then checked the disk and discovered that it did not pass on that drive. Ironically, it failed even more checksums on the drive that burned it!

So to ensure no problems during install, check the cd with each computer/drive combination you try. Eventually I installed from a commercial disk found in the back of a book about Ubuntu. This install was flawless.

I was disappointed that I was unable to incorporate audio tools into Xubuntu loaded on my 600X.  But I remembered that Puppy Linux had simple but powerful tools included in its distro.  And, since it is a live CD you can boot it from the CD and run it.  In fact, many Linux distros have Live CDs, but Puppy is designed to run that way.

Now I have all of the simple audio tools I might need.  Advanced stuff like multi track recording and adding effects will be done on the new machine (soon to be ready I hope).  But what you want to be able to do is convert between formats and perhaps trim some portions of the file out.  Puppy Linux comes through in great fashion.
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