I wanted to try Windows 7 on my “grandpa computer” (it’s six years old this month) equipped with an ATI Radeon 9200. Having already installed it elsewhere, I preferred to postpone the search for drivers until after installation; good decision because the only drivers it couldn’t find were those for the video card and the secondary sound card (well, I already knew this and in fact I had them already prepared). ...

Network Manager is an excellent wireless/wired/VPN/Dial-up network manager, but it doesn’t always work well. A worthy replacement is Wicd. To install it, you can follow the instructions on the Ubuntu Wiki, but on Lucid Lynx, when it tries to uninstall the Network Manager packages (“network-manager” and “network-manager-gnome”), it fails. You might say “Who cares? I’ll leave them there and start Wicd!”. Why? In my case, they conflicted with each other and Wicd couldn’t connect. ...