[SlugLUG] My newly Feisty Averatec laptop

[Peter Belew]

I just installed the Feisty Faun 7.04 version of Ubuntu on my Averatec laptop.

I started to upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS at the GIIP installfest on
Thursday, and ran into some problems late in the upgrade - there were
conflicts in some X11 software that I couldn't resolve. This may have
been because I interrupted 'abt-get dist-upgrade' at one point, and
tried to restart that at home.

What I finally did later in the day was to install 7.04 from scratch.
Fortunately I have a separate /home partition, so I didn't need to
restore my data (though I had saved it on a USB drive). Actually I had
saved some files from /etc and its subdirectories, which helped me
restore some configurations, and I had backed up some MySQL databases
in corresponding .sql files, so those were easily restored.

The installation went smoothly, and restoring the various extra
packages I needed was easy (Apache2, PHP, MySQL, some wireless tools,
etc.)

For me, the biggest bonus was finally having a working driver for the
RT2500 network card built into this laptop. There has been a lot of
trouble with getting this card supported properly up till now. I had
previously resorted to buying a Netgear card and plugging that in. Now
that's not necessary, though I believe that I should get better
performance with the Netgear card at home, where I have a Netgear
wireless AP.

Thanks to the GIIP people for putting the installfest on, and
providing some encouragement.

- Peter Belew