David R. Heffelfinger

I just finished installing Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on my HP Pavilion dv6810us, which is part of the HP dv6000 series

Installation was fairly straightforward, the only hiccup I found was that wireless networking was not working out of the box, I had to install ndiswrapper, but thankfully this was pretty painless. All I had to do was install ndisgtk

sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

And the Windows XP drivers for its wireless card (identified as 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01) by lspci According to this post in the Ubuntu forums, the correct drivers can be found here.

Once I installed ndisgtk and downloaded the windows drivers, all I had to do was point ndisgtk to the .inf file included with the driver, and wireless "just worked", no mucking around with blacklisting drivers or anything like I had to do with previous versions of Ubuntu

I also ran into an issue in which the system would stop booting unless a key (any key) was pressed repeatedly. This issue seems to be affecting several Hewlett Packard (HP) and Compaq laptops.

This issue was reported on launchpad, and I found a workaround there.

The file /boot/grub/menu.lst needs to be edited as root, I use vi as my editor, substitute the following command with your favorite editor:

vi /boot/grub/menu.list

Find the following line:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=c877e76e-7e7f-4b47-aec7-6ae28d1ab767 ro quiet splash

and append "acpi=noirq" to it. After doing this the line should look like this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=c877e76e-7e7f-4b47-aec7-6ae28d1ab767 ro quiet splash acpi=noirq

After making the above modifications I was able to boot to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex normally.

I recently got involved in a project that may need some portlet development. The project is a completely new application to be built from the ground up.

The customer has been using GlassFish as their application server and they are very pleased with it, therefore it just makes sense to continue using it.

The OpenPortal Portlet Container can be installed in GlassFish from its update tool, therefore it made sense to try it out.

Once installed, I also installed the NetBeans Portal Pack plugin from NetBeans 6.5 RC2, that can be installed directly from the NetBeans Plugin Manager.

The plugin makes deploying portlets to OpenPortal a breeze, as can be seen in this flash demo.

My main complaint? The default look and feel of the portlet is, let's just say, not the best looking.

As far as I can tell the only way to change the default look is to hack the CSS and JSPs by hand. I noticed the icons to minimize a portlet, maximize it, edit it, etc had transparent backgrounds, therefore it gave me some hope that they should be able to be used when simply changing the background color of the portlet bar. I made a simple modification to the CSS to test this, unfortulately it seems like some of the pink background creeped into the icons.

Also, as far as I can tell, modifying the available tabs to match our application requirements will involve some customizations of the JSPs included with OpenPortal, there is no tool to create or modify tabs as necessary.

Even with these disadvantages, I'm leaning towards using OpenPortal if we in fact turn out to need portlets for this project. The tight integration with GlassFish and NetBeans is a great advantage and I can live with having to do some CSS and JSP hacking to make it look the way we need it to look.