Installation
Went quite honestly like a charm. I have experienced faster installations with Fedora Core 2 on the same hardware, but there were no errors or problems at all. After installation the system was ready to log in to.

Playing MP3 with rhythmbox
Was one of my first problems as the player that ships with ubuntu does not have MP3 support built into the system. I found the solution from here. To say it short, one must:
add extra sources (universe, multiverse) to /etc/apt/sources.list by hand or with the help of synaptics.

System->Administration->Synaptic Package Managment
Settings->Repositories->Add-> Check Universe & Multiverse

and then simply execute:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins

or install the gstreamer0.8-plugins package using synaptic.

ATI IXP150 Modem
Getting the modem to work is quite easy, what you need is to install the slmodem package:

sudo apt-get install slmodem

Then bear in mind that the modem is /dev/ttySL0 . You can use it just like any other modem.

IrDA
Irda needs irda-utils package, which can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install irda-utils

also, you should configure irda to start up and look for devices. It can be done by editing /etc/default/irda-utils and making sure they are set to something like this:


ENABLE=true
#Mind you that the device name is system specific!
DEVICE=/dev/ttyS2
AUTOMATIC=true
DISCOVERY=true


Then either reboot the computer or try running


/etc/init.d/irda-setup start
/etc/init.d/irda-utils start

To access the irda device found, you probably need to run

sudo MAKEDEV irda

before you can access /dev/ircomm0, to which your Nokia mobile’s bulitin modem will be conected to.

Skype
I use skype for communications and so I wanted to run it on Ubuntu aswell.
The debian package provided on www.skype.com will not install, so I looked for another way and found it on the Ubuntu forum. Idea is that you need a right package and you can get it from:

http://rapidshare.de/files/6743630/skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb.html

afterwards install it with:

sudo dpkg -i skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb

it should run now, but it will look awful. To make it a bit more decent, i used the solution provided here.

Since my laptop has a built-in atiixp ac’97 sound card problems were sure to arise. Skype’s sound was unreliable to say in short. A fix for the problem is described here.

The idea is that you should execute as
echo "skype 128 32768" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss
that will enable alsa’s oss emulation for skype. It seems to fix the sound problems.