ComputerConfiguration

We use a desktop PC as the workstation, a netbook as the controller of the robot.

The configurations are listed as follows:

• Netbook
  Acer Aspire ONE D257-1699, Specs
  The wireless controller: Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 100

• Desktop PC
  MSI GTS 250, Nvidia Cuda GPU.
  Driver: Additional Drivers: " NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version current) [Recommended] ".

There is some issues with the netbook wireless card driver on Ubuntu 10.04. The widely used driver is developed as part of iwlwifi project.
Tried compat-wireless-2.6.33.6.tar.bz2, 2.6.32.1.6, 3.6.6-1, instructions here,
None of them worked, had to upgrade to ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It has a newer kernel, would solve many driver issues on ubuntu 10.04. And it has a longer official support period, until April 2017 as composed to April 2013 for 10.04.

It may ask you for the log in information when you install ubuntu 12.04 LTS through USB. The default username for live Ubuntu 12.04 is ubuntu, with blank password. But it didn't work so well. An error popped out when trying to start the installation application. So we had to upgrade the system from ubuntu 10.04.

The partition table of the computers:

• Netbook(250GB)
  sda1(ntfs), 13.6GB, Acer Backup
  sda2(ntfs), 100MB, Win7 Boot
  sda3(ntfs), 73.4GB, Win7
  sda5(ext4), 300MB, /boot
  sda6(swap), 300MB, swap
  sda7(ext4), 154.8GB, /
• Destop PC:
  sda1(ntfs), 96.6GB, WinXP
  sda2(ext4), 300MB, /boot
  sda3(swap), 4GB, swap
  sda5(ext4), 149.1GB, /