Installing Kubuntu on a ThinkPad A30

Summary

I have a A30 (2652-3CU) model. I wanted to install Kubuntu upon it and get everything working, using the base install as much as possible. That is I didn't want to install a bunch of extra software. I just wanted an 'out of the box' configuration

Update System

First things first, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment the other sources and get your system up to date

 # sudo apt-get update 
 # sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Wireless LAN

I wanted to use WPA encryption. To get WPA you must use the wpasupplicant module. In order to use the wpasupplicant module you must also use the hostap wireless driver. Kubuntu comes with both the hostap and orinico wireless drivers installed by default. But, you need to install the hostap-utils package because it does a couple of things for you (like blacklisting the orinico driver so it doesn't load on boot and adds another wireless interface).

 # sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant hostap_utils -y
 

Rename network interfaces

On my machine when I did the install, Kubuntu named the wired LAN eth1 and my wireless eth0. eth0 is usually your wired interface and wlan0 is your wireless. So edit the /etc/iftab file and rename eth1 to eth0 and eth0 to wlan1. Afterwards mine looked like:

 root@ubuntu:/# cat /etc/iftab 
 # This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces.  See iftab(5).
 eth0 mac 00:d0:59:83:5f:d2
 wlan1 mac 00:20:e0:89:8f:e2

Configure wpa_supplicant

You need to add the information to connect to you wireless access point into the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file like:

 # wpa_passphrase <ssid> <passphrase> >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

in my case it looks like:

 # wpa_passphrase StayOffChannelOne my_password >> >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Edit /etc/network/interfaces

Lastly, I you need to change your /etc/network/interfaces to include bringing up wpa_supplicant prior to ifuping wlan0, and change the old entry for eth1 to eth0. Mine looks like:

 root@ubuntu:/home/jstrauss# cat /etc/network/interfaces 
 # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
 # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
       
 # The loopback network interface
 auto lo wlan0
 iface lo inet loopback
     
 # This is a list of hotpluggable network interfaces.
 # They will be activated automatically by the hotplug subsystem.
 mapping hotplug
         script grep
         map eth0
  
 # The primary network interface
 #iface eth0 inet dhcp
    
 iface wlan0 inet dhcp
       pre-up wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -D hostap -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &
       post-down killall wpa_supplicant

• • Note ** you should be able to use the /etc/default/wpasupplicant to startup the wpa_supplicant, but I can't get it to work.