Archive for July, 2009

Ubuntu 8 to 9.04 upgrade

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I Upgraded my laptop (Compaq nc2400) to 9.04 using the built in upgrade routine last night and everything seems ok so far.

The living room computer is now also running Jaunty but as a fresh install running from a 4GB memory card (the hard drive bit the dust a week or so ago) and after a bit of Codec installing it plays .mp3’s and DVD’s with out any problems.

Sorry not very exciting news i know but if anything interesting crops up i will let you know…….

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It’s a Crazy, Crazy world….

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I had a bit of a problem running Google Earth (v 5.0.11729.1014) on my laptop (Compaq nc2400 with Ubuntu 8.?)
I know this laptop can take it – once upon a time it had Vista Business (feel free to groan away Stuart) running on it and Google Earth worked well.

Google earth Opens ok with no errors or anything but it looks like this – and was very stutterey when zooming.

Broken Google Earth

With the help of Google i found out that un-ticking the “Atmosphere” option under the View menu made the zoom a lot smoother but I was still left with a hollow looking image….

Compiz seemed to work OK so i figured the issue was more to do with OpenGL then with graphics drivers. I did have a look around for other drivers for the Intel Mobile 945GM G_card thats in my laptop (found what G_card i had with this BTW). I had a stab at installing them and did not get far…

I was running Ubuntu 8 and V 9.04 was now available so i upgraded and now Google Earth looks like this -

Happy Google Earth

Ok so I’m none the wiser at to what the original issue was but with Jaunty Google Earth is a happier place.

It’s not a perfect world though – when ever i open a menu or switch to another window in the same work space Google Earth does “battle” a bit with it resulting in gray squares and the outlines of continents ect overlying the other program I’m tyring to look at.

How ever if I open Google earth in it’s own workspace/cube side its okish. Opening and closing a menu within Google Earth results in flash of my desktop Image, a flash of gray then back to the Earth Image… I suspect this is the combination of Google Earth and Compiz on a, slightly puney, laptop graphics card. I can live with it as the rest of Google Earth seems to work ok.

Update – Google earth’s basic bits work ok how ever the extra info bits do not display properly. Having had a prod about on Google it looks like Compiz and any OpenGL based program, Google Earth being one, don’t work well together…..

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Checking what hardware you have installed In Ubuntu

Friday, July 24th, 2009

to check what hardware you have installed in Ubuntu go to the terminal and use sudo lshw.

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