Welcome Helianthi

John Lehmann — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 03:00:00 GMT

A New Laptop For A New Year

I went to JB Hi-Fi and after much indecision and wandering up and down the aisles, bought an HP Laptop. As I was planning to use it for Linux and probably wanted dual boot with Windows, I selected one with a larger hard disk drive.

I played with Windows 10 on the laptop and was gripped by buyer's remorse. I became quite grumpy. What was I going to do with this thing? After fiddling with a few settings to make it feel more homely and not succeeding much I set about installing Linux.

I took the easy choice and decided on Ubuntu, downloaded the Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS via bittorrent and flashed it onto a USB stick.

Make Some Room: The Ubuntu installation is smoother if there is an empty disk partition for it. The last thing I did in Windows was to use the Disk Manager to shrink the main disk volume.
Booting To BIOS: The next step was to restart and press the escape key while restarting. This shows a menu that lets you press [F10] to get into the BIOS. In the BIOS you need to disable secure boot.
Install From USB: Installing Ubuntu from the USB stick proved to be very smooth. It was just a matter of clicking the buttons and waiting. Almost all the hardware was supported by default.
Installing Drivers For Wifi Card: There is one little bit of traditional Linux software tinkering. The laptop turns out to have a wifi card that is not supported by the default install of Ubuntu.

First, to find the make of the wireless card:

$ lspci -v | grep -i network
03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8821CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
  Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company RTL8821CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

This particular Realtek model (RTL8821CE) required an alternate driver.

First, prepare to install some software:

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential git dkms

Install Realtek Driver

The driver for this wireless card is maintained by Tomás Pinho. The software must be downloaded and installed, but this is straightforward:

$ git clone http://github.com/tomaspinho/rtl8821ce
$ cd rtl8821ce/
$ chmod +x dkms*.sh
$ sudo ./dkms-install.sh
$ sudo reboot

Reboot and configure your wireless adapter.

Helianthi (Posts about blog)

Welcome Helianthi

A New Laptop For A New Year

Install Realtek Driver