Installing ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot

First I booted my shiny new machine into the pre installed windows 7. Good, it works but windows was not here to stay. I just used the occasion to update the BIOS of the machine to the newest version and removed the drive to replace it with a crucial m4 with 128 GB - bye bye windows. I probably archive the recovery partition as I might use it again when I replace the machine with a new one and give it away or sell it. I also still have a case for 2.5" drives use the drive as an external USB drive.

Installation 
OK, I downloaded ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot 64 bit desktop edition and prepared a bootable USB pen drive with the help of unetbootin. After finding out that you have to push F1 instead of the ThinkVantage-Button I got into the BIOS and checked that IDE is configured with AHCI in order get good performance with the SSD. Booting into the live system was fine. I partitioned the drive with a 16 GB swap and the rest as ext4. Installation and reboot...

First Boot
After the first login I was shocked that the touchpad didn't work although it worked fine in the live system. The workaround was to activate the touchpad in the gnome configuration:

sudo aptitude install dconf-tools
dconf-editor

• Search for: /org/gnome/settings-daemon/peripherals/touchpad/
• Check "touchpad-enabled"

Initial SSD stuff
Quickly checking the SSD by  sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda results in mind blowing 319.17 MB/sec - YESSSS! As I read, ubuntu mounts per default with the relatime mount option which is a decent compromise. About the trim and tempfs stuff I will do that later.

Monitor Calibration
The FHD monitor's colors were just horrible, totally blueish. Quick search and yes, somebody posted an icc profile. Importeded into color profiles and ahhh... so warm now.

Wireless
Just in that moment when I started to be happy and copied my personal files over from my old machine. And it was slow as hell. The reason is a bug in ubuntu with the wireless in 11n mode. Lots of IP packet are being lost and the download rate never exceeds 2.5 MB/s. There is a bug filed at launchpad which has a high activity. I subscribed and hope for a solution soon.

Misc
All other hardware seems to work fine. Now some stuff I always do after ubuntu installation:

Multimedia codecs and stuff like mp3:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

DVD Playback:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

A4 papersize

sudo dpkg-reconfigure libpaper1

CUPS PDF printer

sudo apt-get install cups-PDF

My New Notebook Lenovo T520

After 3 years with my Lenovo T61p I decided that it's time to get a new machine. My old one had 4GB RAM and as I'm running a 64 bit ubuntu it started to run out of RAM constantly when working on software projects. The disk was also busy virtually all the time and really slowed down the machine very much. I bought a refurbished machine from the German Lenovo partner www.nbwn.com. It's almost new but with a mind blowing price of 1035 Euro, which I find very cheap for this specs:

• Lenovo T520 4243-WR7 (CTO)
• Intel Core i7 2620M 2x 2.70 GHz
• 8 GB DDR3 RAM
• 320 GB HDD
• 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080)
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
• 720p WebCam
• DVD Multiburner
• Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300
• Bluetooth
• 9 Cell Battery
• Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit
• On-Site warranty until 04/2014

The machine has got a Danish keyboard so I ordered an US-English international one which will install by my self. For some time already I wanted one of these shiny new SSD's on the market and now was the time to get one. I decided for a crucial m4 with 128 GB which is IMHO the best bang for the buck at the moment as it really got fast after recent firmware updates.

Installing the SSD was quite painless. But now I need to install ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot on the machine. I guess this endeavor will result in some posts the following days...