OneAndOneIs2

Having set up my shiny new widescreen dual-core laptop to dual-boot, it was time to start seriously hacking Vista into a usable OS.

First things first: Get the damn WiFi working. Vista and Ubuntu both refused to do this. Ubuntu won't even show me the existence of the router in the wifi GUI menu. Vista will, it just wouldn't connect to it.

I switched the router from "WEP or WPA" to just WEP (because I was certain of the WEP key) and boom, it worked. Switched it back to WPA subsequently and worked out the right settings, and it still works. Yay.

Now online, I could start snagging FOSS apps to replace the crud Vista had come with, and clear out all the crap. My cunning plan is to get Vista and Ubuntu using all the same apps and sharing data via the shared FAT partition if need be, so it's the same experience using either.

So far so good:

That's Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, VLC, Winamp, Vim, and OpenOffice in the bottom corner; and a wallpaper off KDE-look. I've put Clamwin anti-virus on, tho I'm not sure why I've bothered with one at all.

I also put Yad'm on for times when I want the cube desktop on Vista, and I've put on a few cross-platform games like Darwinia and Doom 3.

Getting WiFi working on Ubuntu was a bit tricky, but I got it in the end. The GUI from "System Preferences network" doesn't show anything. But the CLI did:
iwlist eth1 scan showed the various WiFi networks

Then a script with the following run via sudo:
iwconfig eth1 mode managed key [26-character WEP key]
iwconfig eth1 essid "Livebox-93B0"
dhclient eth1
connected me to the right one, and just like that I was online.

So.. all-in-all, the laptop is gradually becoming bearable. Vista is getting steadily marginalized by the pruning of the crud and the adding of FOSS, and Ubuntu works with pretty much all the hardware out-the-box. WiFi was the only niggle, and that's sorted now. So I just have to set it up so the taskbars, wallpaper etc. mirror Vista and Ubuntu will be all sorted too. Yay!