Today I purchased a laptop from Aldi. The laptop is the Medion model MD96340. It comes with Windows Vista, this is really my first hands on experience with Vista, and frankly, I’m not impressed. In fact, I was so unimpressed that I downloaded Ubuntu Linux 7.10, and installed it. As expected, wireless networking did not work out of the box. Linux is notorious for having lagging wireless support. he wired network card did indeed work though. I did some searching, and found that the latest linux kernel does support my wireless chipset. I downloaded the new kernel and followed the instructions for building a new kernel package. Once I managed to get everything installed I rebooted, and did indeed have wireless access. One problem, I now had no sound support. After some researching, I found that I had of course forgotten to re-compile the ALSA modules against the new kernel. I installed the alsa sources, and ran the command to build the new package, and it failed. At this point I grew weary of the package mindset, and decided to just compile it normally. This also failed. A quick check of the ALSA project website revealed that there was a new version that addresses the error I was getting. I then downloaded the new version and built it. Once it was built and installed, I rebooted and when things came back up sound worked.
Right now I am typing this from my new laptop, using ubuntu linux.
John's Musings 