Ubuntu & Dell Vostro 1510 .. Frazzles

So over the last week I installed ubuntu on my laptop.. When I finally got my wireless working I thought I was done with all my setups. Before purchasing the laptop I figured that I might not be able to get the wireless up on dell laptops and took a risk .. But that worked like a charm.. I hardly spent about 15 mins resolving that.. (which is pretty good .. sometimes i spend hours and days to get stuff working).. But that hardly is the end of things .. I compiling here a list of problems I had faced and where I found the resolutions

Ethernet Problems..
On the 1510 the onboard ethernet card is an RTL81111/8168B.. ubuntu loads r8169.ko driver.. I had to download and install the driver from the realtek website detailed instructions can be found here.. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/208012. The 8169 driver functions sometimes . That led me to believe NetworkManager was screwing up things.. But really I still dont know why it worked sometimes

Update as of 28th oct I think this is resolved in ubuntu hardy.. I dont think that this is a problem anymore.. not sure which Kernel version it was fixed

Wireless ..
This was easy to come to .. Ubuntu distributes ndiswrapper package.. you just need to install and follow instructions.. you will need the windows drivers for this..

Web cam ..
Ok .. so basically the uvc video driver in ubuntu hardy works well ..I was able to get the webcam up and working using programs like cheese .. but I still had problems with getting it to work with flash and firefox.. The answers were here.. this is still a hack and you have to have the flashcam program running if you wanna use the cam..a small inconvenience..;)

Nvidia Drivers

I found that the nvidia drivers that are available in the ubuntu reps to be a bit older .. Im not sure why this is so .. basically the version numbers in the reps are around 68. or 69.xxx. The ones in the nvidia drivers page are around the 178.xx series.. really not sure what these mean but in general I decided to trust nvidia's drivers .. Installation is fairly straigt forward..
1. Bring up the system
2. Goto the nvidia site and download drivers for your card series
3. goto the shell using ctrl-alt- f1.
4. login as root.
5. type killall gdm Xorg gdmgreeter
6. run the downloaded program using sh Nvidiadrivers.xxxx
7. follow the instructions..
8. type startx and things should be fine..

the only problem is that you need to do this every time the kernel updates..

I actually managed to get sim city 4 using wine .. working on this .. so it is pretty cool

ciao