eMachines D620

Not sure if this is the right forum for this...

Anyway, a few days ago I picked up an eMachines D620 from Best Buy for under $400. It had Vista pre-installed, but I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 8.10 immediatly. Install took about 45 minutes and everything worked minus the built in wifi. After about an hour of googling and testing solutions I found this site http://madberry.org/2008/08/how-to-get-atheros-ar242x-wireless-to-work-2/ took about 15 minutes but the wifi worked wonderfully after that.

I've also installed Flash 8 via Wine and thus far have had no issues

Just thought I'd share my experience :)

Thanks for sharing! I picked up one of these machines yesterday, and I've been looking for a way to get the wifi working.

Maybe I'm just lucky. 8.10 picked up the wi-fi right away, and showed me people in the neighbourhood I'd never seen before. The machine's not perfect. It's a bit clunky and slow, even with 3 gigs of ram installed. I can't get Google Earth to run for the life of me (so far any way). I'm not ready to give up on it. It was a bargain for the quality it is.

DonL, if your problem is that Google Earth is running slow, the cause might be that integrated video is not using 3d acceleration. You should try to install AMD proprietary drivers from the official site.

I bought eMachines D620 in Moscow for about $365, I think it's amazing for that amount of money :)

Thanks! I'll try that. I can't understand why this technology can't support that.

Well, I've downloaded and installed the proprietary drivers from AMD, and re-installed Google Earth about five times, both from the Medibuntu repositories and the official site, with no luck. As root, I can start it up, but it dies right away, with a message that there's a bug in the software and it will be reported to Google. I'm getting better results now from GLXGears, though. If anyone has any other ideas about Google Earth, I'd appreciate hearing them. It's one program I really miss.

DonL, you should create a topic called Google Earth than experienced users would help.

Hi I am trying to get Ubuntu 11.04 to install on one of these machines. It gets to the Ubuntu with the dots mouse works but will not get into program. Even tried 10.04. Any help or ideas appreciated.