Installed Ubuntu 9.10 x86

My ailing laptop needed a complete rebuild this weekend. Windows XP wouldn’t install; Ubuntu did… eventually.

I installed Ubuntu x86 this time for convenience. More more niggles than 9.04 though:

1. Palimpsest says my hard disk is failing. I ran badblocks (destructive mode) for around 6 hours before installing Ubuntu and not a single block was reported/ reallocated. Many Palimpsest false positives are reported on Launchpad.
2. Google Mail won’t work. I’ve previously written about this. As far as I can tell it’s a problem with my ISP: TalkTalk. I changed the maximum MTU to 1360 at the router. No need to use sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1360.
3. Power management does not work. I’ve not looked into this.
4. I can’t browse my Windows network. This was fixed by modifying smb.conf , nsswitch.conf, and installing winbind.