Ubuntu Forums

I was reading in the Ubuntu forums and came across a post from someone who who having trouble booting Ubuntu for the first time. Everyone who responded was really nice to him and patient. He had downloaded Ubuntu, checked winMD5Sum to make sure it was ok, and burned a boot cd. But when he runs the cd to boot Ubunt, it freezes. Several people tried to help him. Some of their help was hard for me to understand, and I wondered how he understood it if he was new to Ubuntu. One of the replies looked like this:

"HI there, ive got the same laptop as you, to get it working under 8.04 you need to do the following.
download the ubuntu alt CDat the cd boot prompt press F6 and type in noapic.
once installed to your liking and you have rebooted, let the os load up, once its stoped at loading local scripts press alt F2 and login.
you need to install and configure the xorg-driver-fglrx via envyng.Type (each line individually separated by return)
Code:sudo bash *//..and then enter your password, this logs you in as root.
update-pciids
apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install envyng-core *// Installs Video Driver Install system.
envyng-t
Select option 3 to install the ATI Preparatory video driver.
shutdown now *// shuts down the computer, reboot and let it load.The xserver should load up.

To get the wirless working with your card, if its the same as mine, Atheros AR5007EG you need to download and patch the madwifi kernel modual.
Loadup the terminal (applications > accessory's > terminal) and type..
Code:sudo bash *//Same as before.
apt-get install build-essential *//Installs a build inviroment.
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz
tar zxvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz
cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007
sudo make uninstall
sudo make clean
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci *//loads the patched ath_pci module....and then reboot."

Wow! That seems pretty crazy to me. And intimidating. And this post was for someone who hadn't even gotten it installed or running yet. I thought that was pretty interesting. It was cool that so many people took the time to help and he did get it running in the end.