Kubuntu on free laptops

The school system I work for replaced out over 200 old Dell Inspiron 4000 laptops with newer models this past fall. Instead of sending them off to be recycled, everyone in the IT department was given the opportunity to take one (or four) for themselves. The rest of them would be held for parts. I decided to take a couple to give to the daughters of some friends of my in-laws.

The machines are decent:

One problem is that I couldn’t leave Windows XP installed because it was licensed to the school system. Windows XP didn’t run very well on the systems anyway. It was usable but somewhat slow. Instead of telling the people I was giving the laptops to that they would need to purchase a license for Windows 2000 (it runs really well on the laptop), I decided to just load it up with Kubuntu 6.10.

I based the decision to load Kubuntu on the fact that the daughters only needed to be able to surf the Internet, a lot, and write school papers. Kubuntu comes with OpenOffice so the school papers were covered. I set the default file extension for saving text documents to Microsoft Word so that they wouldn’t have to remember to change it every time. I also changed Calc to automatically save as an Excel file. Firefox was installed because they already use it at home on their XP system.

The TrueMobile 1150 NIC was removed because it is 802.11b and only supports WEP. They already purchased a couple of MSI 802.11g cardbus NIC’s for two other laptops, they died hence these replacements, so I installed those on the “new” laptops. The MSI cards use a Broadcom BCM4306 chipset. I initially assumed I would need to use NdisWrapper to make the cards work but that wasn’t the case. I found a document in the Ubuntu Community detailing another way to install the drivers. All I had to do was download/install bcm43xx-fwcutter and the Windows drivers for the NIC. I was able to install the program and drivers on the Inspiron 4000 by putting them on a USB drive and following the Edgy instructions. The only thing I had to do different than what the instructions said was to run sudo ifconfig eth0 down and sudo ifconfig eth0 up after step 1.3.2 before the network manager would recognize the NIC. After that, the MSI cards worked perfectly. I also installed KNetworkManager (NetworkManager front-end) to make it easy to switch between wireless networks.

Kubuntu is running really well on the systems. That’s not to say it will stay on there. If they decide to buy a license for Win2K, I’ll load that for them because that’s what they are more comfortable with.

Try not to become a man of success but a man of value. – Albert Einstein

15.Jan.07 Hardware, Operating Systems

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2 Responses to “Kubuntu on free laptops”

  1. Lineman | January 15th, 2007 at 10:00 pm

    That’s actually pretty impressive. I mean, compared to the processor, that’s damned good hardware. :)

  2. darkfusion | January 17th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

    Pretty smart idea of getting kubuntu out there a little more .

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