Installing Ubuntu 9.10 With Google Desktop on T23

[Paul Pennington]

I picked up a British magazine at Borders this week, Linux Pro. It was a special issue on the Google desktop programs, and it included a DVD with 4.3 GB of Ubuntu 9.10 and the Google stuff.

My old T23 was getting kinda slow, so I decided to put a spare 40GB hard disk in it and give Linux a try. It's a 2647-6RU, and I had upgraded it to 1.2 GHz and 1 GB of memory. I put the DVD in the drive, booted up by pressing F12 and picking the optical drive to boot from, and away it went. The 40 GB drive had the former owner's Windows partitions on it (with an unknown password), so I let the installer blow away everything and install Linux on the entire drive. Worked like a charm, it even told me what was there and asked nicely before proceeding. Much easier than ThinkPad recovery or Windows installation discs. I left my wired network plugged in, and it pretty much installed by itself, and ran a huge update besides. Everything seemed to be working correctly so I unplugged the network wire and plugged in my PC card wireless NIC. No Internet. I did a bunch of searching on the Internet for help but didn't find much that seemed to apply, or was understandable.

Next day, I went by Barnes & Noble and read the wireless sections of two very expensive books ($35 and $50). As I suspected, the wireless WAS working. Turns out, there's an icon at the upper right corner of the screen next to the clock that represents networking. Clicking on it showed the disconnected wired network, and, lo and behold, the SSID of my wireless network. Clicked on it, entered my WPA2 password, and it all started working. Turned out to be easier than installing Windows.

The main problem seems to be that Linux programmers feel obligated to think up cutsey names for everything (example: the graphical user interface is "Gnome"). Also, almost everything I read about Linux on the Internet is wrong -- the problems apply to old versions that have been mostly fixed. Plus, the "experts" like to show off and use esoteric terminal commands to do everything, when the problem can usually be fixed with a few mouse clicks
in the graphical interface. I have not experienced any of the problems I read about on the so-called help forums. Battery life seems to be about the same. The only change I made was to kill the old version of the Google Chrome browser and download the current version, which I'm also using on my other computers under XP.

So, the old T23 is sitting down in the kitchen to be used for reading the Wall Street Journal every morning. Seems quite peppy now. I'm a happy camper.

[Harryc]

Nice one Paul. it's always good to see someone take an older model and turn it useful again. I have a T23 here too...it's an all time favorite of mine. I've been rebuilding it to look/function as new and am almost done. I have a wireless LCD/Lid coming in this week to give it internal WiFi. Runs XP Pro at the moment.