No wireless, but music and video

Well, the upgrade went well, so now I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 beta on my old laptop, and it seems pretty cool. I think it's better than the older version.

I couldn't get my wireless card to work right, though. I must admit, however, that I didn't put as much effort into it since I don't really need it right now. NDIS wrapper comes installed in 7.04, so I didn't have to download it. I used the same couple of commands as before to get the driver installed. I also found a program called "Windows Wireless Drivers" in the "Add/Remove Programs" application which does the same thing without text commands. Anyways, once the wireless driver is installed, Network Manager is supposed to handle everything. It sorta does. I can see all of the nearby wireless networks, but I just can't connect to them. Maybe this will be fixed in the official version. I'll just use the LAN in my office at ASU for now.

I'm testing Ubuntu on this laptop to make sure it will work for my PC at home. This PC is very important because it holds my entire music collection and a large number of downloaded videos (mostly anime that I haven't had time to watch yet). So I want to make sure ubuntu can play mp3 and unprotected wma files, as well as play all sorts of video formats. I would also like a nice media jukebox application and a video editor.

The first thing to do when installing ubuntu 7.04 is to go to "Add/Remove..." and show "All available applications". Then search and select "Ubuntu restricted extras" for installation. This single package does much that EasyUbuntu and Automatix2 does. It installs many of the audio/video codecs that you might need, a Flash player for Firefox (so you can watch YouTube videos), Microsoft fonts, and Java. If there is a audio/video file you can't play still, 7.04 also will try to find and download the proper package for you, so you don't have to. These are new features and they make Ubuntu so much easier to use.

But I still need to pick an appropriate media jukebox...