Installing Ubuntu on an Averatec 5500 Laptop

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Karmic Koala) on my Averatec 5500 Laptop. This is the first version where everything seemed to work out of the box, including the built in RT2500 WiFi card.

While everything works, there are a few minor glitches I've noticed. I'll outline those below and list any tweaks I've made. I'll also list some of my favourite software, other than what's installed by default.

When you Suspend the Averatec 5500 it goes to sleep in about 5 seconds. When you try to wake it up, however, the system locks up. I wrote about this problem and how to solve it on my page about the Averatec 5500 ACPI.

On my laptop, I like to be able to run sudo without entering a password. To do that, I need to modify the sudoers file. Open it with the following command.

sudo visudo

Now uncomment the line that says it will allow sudo without passwords. Usually the file is well commented. You'll also need to add your user account to the sudo group. I do this through System, Administration, User Manager.

When I'm working in the command line, my editor of choice is Vim. Ubuntu doesn't install it by default, so I execute the following command to quickly install it.

For IRC chat, I prefer the xChat app. To install this one, I usually just pull up Synaptic and search for xchat. In this version it's called xchat-gnome. Checking that also installs it's dependency xchat-gnome-common.

The SSH File System (SSHFS) is a tool that will mount an SSH connection to another Linux box, such as your web host.

sudo apt-get install sshfs

I need a Cisco VPN connection for work. Ubuntu includes support with the following package.

sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc