Ubuntu-Revolution Operating System

I came into the UK in the department of physics to do my M.Phil degree in high energy physics. I was under the impression that the computer facility will be state of the art and much better than what we see in the Indian institutions.
However the truth was far from what I imagined. The computers were having outdated hardware and the version of linux required an update and of course better administrators! Hence I thought of asking the department for a laptop but they refused. Armed by my hard earned money from tutions here I thought, I will buy my own laptop.
So then began the search for finding a laptop that will suit my needs, which were just having email programs and a good screen to watch movies. SO I picked up an Acer Aspire 7520 gemstone with 17 inch screen. It came with windows vista home premium preloaded. I wanted to install linux on the system as I am more used to it but windows is more powerful and has better graphics than usual linux operating system.
In this search I go an opportunity to install ubuntu, which I had heard about before. With the help of my friend Sam I installed ubuntu removing windows completely from the hard drive. Then came some problems.
The first problem was concerning the games in ubuntu. There were not many 3-d games to be played or installed in the system and this was a constraint in using this operating system. Then was about the pidgin messenger which did not have voice or video support. Also another important feature missing was the wireless support. But then these were the cons, there were many good things which made people weigh more in favour of ubuntu.
The good things included the ease of installation the operating system which you can get for free and burn an iso image to your cd from the cite : http://www.ubuntu.com/
The problem of wireless has been solved now and we can take our ubuntu wherever we want to take it with us. This is the result of the programmers all around the world participating in the revolution of free software movement. For those people who still are using the versions till 8.04 version of ubuntu there is an easy way to install it if you follow these steps:http://madberry.org/2008/08/how-to-get-atheros-ar242x-wireless-to-work/
They are summarized here :-
First if the computer has a chipset run in terminal:

lspci | grep Atheros

If the result is as follows or something similar then you are able to use this fix.

05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)



In Terminal go to your desktop:

cd ~/Desktop

Then download the Madwifi driver needed for this How to:

wget -c http://madberry.org/wp-content/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

Untar the Image file(don’t worry it will create a new folder):

tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

Go into the just created dir:

cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007

Because we are going to compile from source code we need to make sure the essentials to do so are installed.

Compile
use a computer program to translate source code written in a particular programming language into computer-readable machine code that can be executed.

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Source Code

The underlying code that makes up a software program. Most commercially available programs come in “binary” form, which is nearly impossible for humans to comprehend. Source code, however, is comprehensible, and if you have it, you can learn how a program does something, change it so it does something else, or otherwise improve it. True geeks swear by source code.

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sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install build-essential

Now run:

sudo make install

sudo modprobe ath_pci

sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

If you get any errors running the modprobe commands you probably forgot to switch off the modules in the first place go back to this and then try modprobe again.

Now the same as we did before:
Click on the Kubuntu start button go to system and click on the “Hardware Drivers Manager” this is where you will find all proprietary drivers. But we’re looking for everything that has Atheros in it. Tick the box in behind of “Atheros Hardware Access Layer(HAL)” and “Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” and restart the computer.

Now you have wireless.


Keep in mind that every time the Kernel gets updated you have to run these commands again:

sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install build-essential

Now run:

sudo make install

sudo modprobe ath_pci

sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

Off course in the madwifi folder. You might want to move the folder to your home folder because we’ll need it again after a Kernel update.

To get your wireless back up that is until they fix the problem in the Kernel and wireless works after restarting with the new Kernel.

Ubuntu is a free software and will always remain free, it is even free of cost! Free software does not means free in price but the software which gives you freedom to share among yourself and improve upon it as per your wishes, that is it comes with the source code which people can modify as per their wishes.
There are a vast amount of programs available through the synaptic package manager or through sudo apt-get install from the terminal line.
There are so many programs to play media which you can get from one line commands or just using the package manager. Amarok replaces the apple i-tunes and youtube and bbc videos can be watched in totem media player. And guess what if you can programa nd make good programs, even you can participate in the revolution of free software movement. I am myself trying to make a free mathematica software for ubuntu as my first project and so can anyone contribute and reap the benefits of this free software movement.
The only good thing about Manchester was to give a 1GB pen drive which I use whenever I can for data transfer :).