Ubuntu 12.04 on my HP6325 Laptop

Hi, been a while I know... Life, it gets in the way of blogging ;-)

Installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my home and work PC's. Home no issues, but HP6325 laptop had an issue recognizing the wireless card and installing the correct drivers.

I used the following article to fix the wireless driver issue:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/80260/wireless-card-mac-not-showing-up

Here's an extract of the important bits:

I use the lspci command to display the details about my hardware. It will display all of your PCI connected hardware. I edited the output to show only the relevant information. The important information here for matching your hardware with mine is this indentifier [14e4:4312].

$ sudo lspci -v   
30:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation
BCM4311 802.11a/b/g (rev 01)
      Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Broadcom 802.11a/b/g WLAN
     Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
     Memory at c8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
     Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
     Capabilities: [58] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
     Capabilities: [d0] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
     Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
     Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel
     Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
     Kernel modules: ssb   

$ sudo lspci -nn 
30:00.0 Network controller [0280]:  Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11a/b/g
[14e4:4312] (rev 01)

The Solution
I am going to install the correct driver for this wireless card. Then I will remove the “incorrect” driver (bcmwl) which Ubuntu installed by default.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
$ sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source
$ sudo reboot

Minicom - HyperTerminal replacement in Ubuntu

Install minicom using the following command

sudo apt-get install minicom

Now you need to check your serial ports using the following command from your terminal

dmesg|grep ttyS


In my case I have a USB to Serial converter for my laptop that has no serial connectors. For this I had to check for:

dmesg|grep tty

You should see similar to the following output:

[ 0.000000] console [tty0] enabled
[ 0.327050] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
[ 0.327417] 00:02: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
[ 77.928931] usb 3-4: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0

This means the device correspond to my serial port is ttyUSB0 (if an actual serial port it should be ttyS0).

Configure minicom using the following command

sudo minicom -s

Use the keyboard keys to select the menu item Serial port setup.

Enter A to change the Serial Device to /dev/ttyS0, and then enter E to change the line speed to 9600 8N1

Using arrow keys, select Save setup as dfl

Select Exit from Minicom.

Next time, from the terminal you only need to run sudo minicom in order to access your Cisco box or you make the user a member of the ‘dialout’ group. Then you don’t have to run minicom with sudo after the initial default configuration. The Dialout group owns all of the serial ports in Ubuntu.

PS - Above info ripped from: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/minicom-hyperterminal-replacement-in-ubuntu.html

Ubuntu Mic not working on HP NX6325 Laptop

I'm posting this here so I (and others) can find it again later...

For the longest time my HP NX6325 laptops Mic never worked in Ubuntu. I used to get it working in older versions but since about version 7 or 8 I could not find any solutions.

I finally started trying all the proposed solutions in threads without success after a fresh 10.10 install.

The following finally worked in Ubuntu 10.10:

On this thread I found a link to a potential solution: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/366563

Here is the link to that particular solution: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1261847&postcount=9

Keeping in mind that the alsa config file is now alsa-base.conf and can be edited with:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

So, edit the above file and enter the following line at the bottom of the file:
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=3stack

Then just save and reboot... AWESOME - FINALLY!!

Skype - Works
Sound Recorder - Works

Just play with your levels in sound preferences to get the best quality.

PlayerZone.co.za

"Buy PC and Console Games at Almost Cost Price"

This is the claim to fame of www.PlayerZone.co.za.

Check it out. If you spend as much as I do on gaming, then every bit to save helps buy that next game so much quicker ;-)

To Blog OR NOT!!

Just been pondering what this blog site should be about...

I am starting to realize without any content people are interested in - no one will visit your site/blog.

The one article I wrote a "how-to" on is my biggest hit to date... because people are interested in the content.

Time to rethink ;-)

Chiao

Ubuntu 10.04

TATA & TUTU - “Human Rights”

We still have some ways to go...