Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation on my HP 6710b

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I have had a tough time getting Ubuntu to install on my HP 6710b. Here I try to list the various sources I referred to, and steps I did to get it working ...

I must mention, most of my experience was guided from this page, Unfortunately, it did not work exactly for me, so I thought the need to write my experience.

Other posts which contributed to my knowledge/experience are

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=488332
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=452697
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=421588
  
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494601

I thank all the contributors to these posts, since I believe the collective knowledge was what enabled me to finally achieve this installation successfully at the end. Thanks guys :)

1. Download and burn the alternate CD for Feisty. The Live CD does not work, and thus breaks the promise of "works out of the box" for this model.
   
2. While you boot your system with the alternate CD, enter some extra boot parameters
1. Press F6 to get to the options screen
2. In the starting enter break=top
3. Towards the end of the boot parameters, enter irqpoll, acpi=off noacpi pnpbios=off
   
3. After this, your system should boot normally.
4. Now, the text based installer (remember its the alternate CD not Live CD), will install the OS onto your system. However, when it comes to installing/configuring x server, the system bump you to a command prompt.
5. At this point, I ran the following (after making sure that I have the network connectivity - at this point ethernet already works)
   
1. sudo apt-get update
2. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
3. sudo echo piix >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
4. sudo update-initramfs -u
6. At this point Reboot your system. Since Grub is already installed, you should normally see a boot menu. Choose Ubuntu from there. DO NOT choose Windows for any reason whatsoever.
7. After reboot, you have a working Ubuntu system minus X server. Log in as usual, in the text mode.
8. Perform this sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
9. Now, take backup of your xorg.conf using
   
1. sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bkp
10. Launch the reconfigure command for xserver configuration using sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
11. And, then take the pain of configuring everything manually.. not automatically. Among, the following steps, I am not sure about the sequence of some.. but more or less, gives you an idea of what comes across..
    
1. Be careful, not all options work good with default values, though most of them do.
2. Do not choose to do an auto-detect for your screen. NO.
3. Choose manually everything that you can for your screen. It asks you for a level of configuration that you want to do, and gives options like Simple, Intermediate, Advanced... there choose Simple.
4. Choose a screen size (15" I think)
5. Choose Resolution.. Careful to choose the widescreen resolutions
6. Decide on memory to be allocated. I chose 256MB
7. Choose color Depth : I chose 24 bit
8. Towards the end, it would ask you to write the configuration to disk, obviously choose yes.
9. it would exit without trying to start x.
12. Now, just type at command line, startx, should work.
13. Once you are in x session, install the driver suggested at intel X3100 Drivers post , Do the configuration as suggested in the post. It works.
14. The X server configuration is done now, the system can be rebooted, and would automatically go into x mode.
15. Lest I forget, Go to the Grub menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) and update the windows vista boot point description. Both normal boot point and recovery boot point have same label by default. If you boot into recovery mode by mistake, the MBR is overwritten.... :(

I can only hope that others would be benefitted by this experience. Unfortunately I did not keep on the fly notes for the whole process, So, quite a bit of this is based on my recollection.

hth
regards
raghav..