I needed to buy a new motherboard on the cheap side the other day. The board that I got has a VIA chipset on board. (Biostar P4M900-M7 SE Motherboard - v7.0) I was hoping to get 3D graphics going on my Ubuntu Linux box without having to buy a new PCIe video card. I finally got it all going. Here’s how:

The first step was to get the latest VIA driver for Ubuntu. Get the driver here.

You will need to extract the files from the tar file. Then run the installation script ./vinstall. Reboot and you should be running on the new via driver.

I could now run glxinfo and had Direct Rendering enabled. glxgears worked fine. However, I still could not enable the Desktop Effects under System/Preferences/Appearance/Visual Effects.

I came accros this script that runs various compiz checks.

Compiz-Check is a script to test if Compiz is able to run on your system/setup and if not, it will tell you the reason why.

Forlong’s Blog - Compiz-Check.

The script indicated the VIA driver was blacklisted. It offered to remove it from the blacklist which I did. Now all of the desktop effects work. Thank you Compiz-Check!

I had a need to turn my Ubuntu desktop into a NAT router and provide DHCP addresses to my local LAN. The local LAN is on the eth0 interface, and the Internet is on the wlan0 wireless interface.

Here’s how I did it …
Read more »

Here is the bug report
Bug #236021 in initramfs-tools Ubuntu: “There is no vfat module in the 2.6.24-17 initrd”

If you installed Ubuntu on a Windows computer using the Wubi install (Ubuntu is installed as a Windows application) and updated to the -17 or -18 kernel, you’ll find that you are dropped to an initramfs prompt after rebooting. Here’s how to fix it until initramfs is updated:

Reboot, select Ubuntu and press the ESC key.
Select the -16 kernel and boot.
Open a terminal window and edit line 210 of the /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hook-functions file.

sudo vim /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hook-functions

Change line 210 from:

virtio_pci; do

to:

virtio_pci vfat nls_cp437 nls_iso8859-1; do

Then rebuild initramfs like this:

sudo update-initramfs -u

Reboot and you should be running the new kernel without problems.

Here is a good site to get you started with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy).
Ubuntu How-To

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron How-To