Ubuntu Feisty Fawn & Acer Aspire 5572 ZWXMi
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TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones (Now replaced by: Fedora 9.)
I recently couldn’t resist in buying a notebook… To be precise, it’s an “Acer Aspire 5572 ZWXMi”. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled. I played a bit with Vista and then decided to install Windows XP. That was easy and no fun at all. So I went for Linux and installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.
But first things first.
BIOS "F6" for GA-M55S-S3
Already available since March 20th, I just recently decided to update my Gigabyte motherboard “GA-M55S-S3 (rev 1.0)” with the latest BIOS, which is by the time of writing version “F6”. And - HURRAY, HURRAY - I don’t need to boot Linux with the “noapic” kernel option anymore!! The guys from Gigabyte finally fixed it! So, to everybody who owns the same motherboard I’d recommend updating your BIOS to the latest version. Get the BIOS files from here and follow the instructions from this Gigabyte help page. Good luck!
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Upgrading to "Lenny"
With “Etch” being released as new Debian stable I decided to upgrade to “Lenny”, Debian’s new testing branch. By the time of writing the difference between stable and testing isn’t very big - Etch was released about three weeks ago. So I didn’t expect any difficulties in upgrading and with one little exception I was right.
As always, updating Debian is very easy. You need to edit “/etc/apt/sources.list” and replace etch or stable with lenny or testing. I prefer the names, because this way you would automatically use the stable branch once lenny becomes stable - which will be in the far, far future. ;-) So, your “sources.list” should look something like this:
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Etch amd64: installing 32bit apps
If you’re running Debian Etch for amd64 you might want to install some 32bit applications, too. As some browser plugins (like Adobe’s Flash oder Sun’s Java) are available as 32bit binaries only, you may need a 32bit browser. In Ubuntu that was done very easily whereas in Debian this task needs a bit of extra work. So, here we go. (The original post can be found in German on debianforum.de. Thanks to “Linuxpeter”!)
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Configuring Debian Etch
Grub
As mentioned in my last post, installing Etch was very quick and easy. If you need to boot the installation CD/DVD with special kernel options, they will be added automatically to grub’s menu.lst and will be there after each kernel update when the menu.lst file is regenerated. Responsible for this is a part of /boot/grub/menu.lst which looks like this: