Notes on upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 6 on HP 9440
After being abnormally active last two weekends because of my well deserved ski holidays I had a chance to return this weekend to more usual couch potato life style. This allowed me to see Welsh proving over French who deserves to win Six Nations and Kubica blowing up his chance to be on the podium of the Formula One race in Melbourne. All that super exciting activities left me some time to play with latest alpha release of the Ubuntu - Hardy Heron Alpha 6. I used HP Compaq Mobile Workstation nw9440 for the trial. So, here are couple of my observations.
Most of the things worked without any problems (graphic card, sound, touchpad, wired network). Great stuff for alpha! However I had couple of problems:
- Hardy will upgrade your Firefox to 3.0 Beta
- probably you will lose most of your plugins
- if you want you can downgrade the version to 2.x, it is still available through Synaptics or apt-get install firefox-2
- Wireless connection does not work
- I have the Intel 3945ABG chip on board.
- The Network Manager doesn’t recognise and show any wireless connection.
- The module iwl3945 is not loaded: lsmod | grep iw
- Other users report the same or similar problems
- There are solutions for the issue but you can expect that if you have the same chip you will encounter the same problem with out of the box configuration.
- VmWare Player
- reconfiguration of the software is needed. Run: vmware-config.pl
- the process will try to build modules for current kernel but unfortunately the compilation can fail
- I had to install missing linux headers: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-12-386
- make sure you have installed build essential packages: sudo apt-get install build-essential
- if the build still doesn’t compile try the vmware-any-any-116. More information on this blog.
I don’t want to discourage you from trying the Hardy release. I am pointing only on issues not telling about good things. It looks like another good release of Ubuntu is on the way. If you are ready for couple of minor issues then try the new version now. If not wait couple of weeks. The final release of Hardy Heron should happen in April 2008.
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Milan Magudia said,
March 17, 2008 @ 7:47 am
Dude, are you sure you upgraded to Alpha 1; sounds to me it’s more like Alpha 6 as Firefox 3 wasn’t in the early alpha’s? (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyReleaseSchedule)
Going to sleep now ;-)
Znachor said,
March 17, 2008 @ 11:18 am
Update: I must to missed it somehow but actually the sound card does not work either.
znachor said,
March 17, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
You are completely right. Typo. I updated the post. Thanks Milan!
Adrian said,
March 17, 2008 @ 7:13 pm
see my post for similar problems, not sure if what I upgraded to was Hardy or not though http://adriansmith.blogspot.com/2008/03/ubuntu-upgrade-to-710-problems.html
Piotr Woloszyn » Ubuntu Hardy - Nautilus not starting due to bonobo activation server said,
April 29, 2008 @ 9:53 am
[…] to the release of Hardy as I upgraded my main computer much before the official release which meant couple of problems which I described in one of my previous posts. Most of the issues were resolved in couple of days but about two weeks ago I started having a […]