Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)

I mentioned in a previous post that a friend had installed ubunt 9.04 on his new dell studio 1555 laptop and that their were no real problems. Well it seems after a bit of time a few problems did show up. The 64-bit kernel (2.6.28) in ubuntu 9.04 had some problems with suspend.

So he installed Ubuntu 9.10 (kernel 2.6.31) and that fixed all the problems with suppend. He has to ad 'noapic' to the kernel line in grub/menu.lst because to get some the special laptop keys working. Their is a bug on it, so maybe it will be fixed in the next few months. Their is also no need to add entries into the modprobe.conf anymore to get the sound working.

So it looks like next release of Ubuntu (9.10) will be a good one for dell studio laptops.

Released PodCaster version 1.0

Just made a release (1.0) of PodCaster. This is the fist time I've removed the beta status from the project. The release is mostly a bug fix release as it's been though quite a bit of testing and bug fixing.

Due to this been a bug fix release, the features are pretty much unchanged:

• Capture Internet radio to audio files.
• Create MP3, WAV and MP4 files.
• Encodes metadata and cover art into the media files.
• Create pod cast from captured radio stations.
• Supports real audio and Microsoft ASF format.

Please goto here to find out more details and download the release.

Ubuntu 9.04 on a Dell Studio 1555 laptop

A friend of mine has just bought a new Dell laptop to run Linux on. Since this is a new version on mine, though it might be useful to blog about it.

The laptop is a Dell Studio 1555 and has the following hardware installed:

Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, 1.3.27ks
2.0 mega pixel UVC webcam
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P7450 @ 2.13GHz
4Gig DDR2 Memory
ATI Technologies Inc M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series]

Ubuntu 9.04 (kernel 2.6.28-15) was installed on the laptop. Apart from the sound, everything worked out of the box. The sound was just a matter of adding the following line on the modprobe.conf, which is going to be included in the new Ubuntu:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6

Seems that dell are now using the Intel Wireless N cards instead of the one that was fitted in my laptop from broadcom. Seems like a smart move as it worked out of the box.