Welcome Helianthi

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

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