Fixing laptop (was Re: [Nelug] Meeting tomorrow?)

[Oliver Burnett-Hall]

On 20/11/07 19:06, James Grabham wrote:
> A bit late notice, but does anyone have  serial to serial cable they
> can lend me till the next meeting; I need one to download the driver
> for my laptops wireless card - catch 22 there; need to download driver
> from network... to get on network.

Did you manage to get the firmware for your wireless card loaded?  If 
you're having problems let me know.

BTW, to get rid of the porthole effect you have when it's booting and in 
console mode, you need to pass a 'vga' as part of the kernel's boot 
parameters.  'vga=791' will probably be the right one for a 1024x768 
resolution.

Try this first by editing the boot command from the grub menu -- if I 
remember right, you select the line you want to change, hit 'e' to edit 
it, then 'a' to append a parameter, and finally 'b' to boot using the 
modified line.

If that works you set it up to do this permanently by editing 
/boot/grub/menu.lst and setting the defoptions variable (i.e. 
'defoptions=vga=791' or whatever -- make sure you read the notes in that 
file about how to make changes, note that you should leave the lines 
commented out).  Once you've edited it, run 'sudo update-grub' to make 
the changes in the boot loader.

HTH,

- olly