Two Weeks With Ubuntu

Two weeks ago yesterday, my shiny new Dell Inspiron 6400 Laptop, preloaded with Ubuntu Linux, arrived on my doorstep. Wanting a laptop (Because I'd just got paid and fancied a new toy), I figured that it was as good a time as any to make a serious effort to switch to Linux and as Dell are now shipping hardware that is tested and supported under Ubuntu it seemed a good choice.

The Laptop in question has a 1.8Ghz Dual Core Intel, 512Mb of RAM, a 60Gb HDD, a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive and all the usual Laptop gubbins (SD card slot, wireless, etc). Due to Dell's policy of charging a sodding fortune for any upgrades you add into your order, I went with the minimum spec for everything except CPU and then shelled out £25 for an extra gig of RAM to help things along (Dell wanted £42 for an extra 512Mb). All in it cost me £410ish.

First up, the annoyingly bad bits - might as well get them out the way first.

• Dell ship the Laptop with a 1280x800 native resolution screen, but the driver they ship only supports 640x, 800x & 1024x resolutions. In order to get 1280x800 working, I had to download a driver that supported the resolution, modify my x.conf and restart X. Not critical, I admit, but a bit stupid for Dell to ship the thing without support for its native resolution.
• Mapping network shares is a pain. Easy to map as an SMB:// path, but a lot of apps (Like VLC) don't support loading files from SMB shares, so you have to mount them. This requires modifying FSTAB so that they mount on boot. This requires reading up on the not-so-simple syntax. This doesn't work with Windows 2003 because it requires SMB signing. So you have to mount them as CIFS shares, which means the Laptop hangs on shutdown (See next point).
• CIFS shares hang the machine on shut down, because the CIFS daemon gets shut down before Ubuntu tries to unmount network shares. So it then can't unmount network shares because it's shut down the CIFS daemon. This one involved finding a 3rd party script to unmount CIFS shares before the CIFS daemon is shut down.
• Not Dell's fault, but just as my Laptop arrived, Ubuntu 7.10 was released. Obviously the Laptop had the old version on it (7.04). Upgrading was fairly simple *but*, the interface didn't tell me that I needed to install all the existing updates for 7.04 before I could upgrade. A quick visit to the Ubuntu site solved that one.

Now the shiny good

• The upgrade to 7.10 (Once I figured it out) was very simple. As was installing the additional software I wanted via Synaptic Package Manager or "Add/Remove", which is a cutdown version with popular apps on it. In fact, the general update process is incredibly simple.
• Configuration of GNOME is very simple and straightforward, though it does take a bit of relearning if you're used to Windows.
• Compiz (Think Aero) looks very pretty - although if cranked up to maximum it does go a little over the top and the performance hit becomes noticeable.
• Amarok.
• So far it's all been very fast, stable & reliable and I have no doubt that as I get more proficient with it I'll find it to be far more powerful than my Windows PC. I just need to see how well WINE handles my gaming requirements now.

There are lots of other things that I could go into, but I think I've droned on quite enough. In conclusion; so far I've been very impressed with Ubuntu and the laptop itself, but it would be nice if the problems I'd come across a) Didn't exist (They wouldn't be hard to fix) and b) Were a little easier to fix than they were (Right-click on SMB share and click Mount, for example). At any rate, I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who was considering a foray into Linux and wants a new laptop while they're at it.