oh sweet sweet ubuntu….. this is my new ninja-rockstar-uber-machine! normally I don’t get super excited about hardware, but I have to say this thing is super sweet and it really flys! 

It’s a normal dual core T500, 4gb ram, (very standard intel graphics) etc., etc., but the truly amazing thing is the newest ubuntu LTS, Lucid Lynx. I took out my optical drive on this baby, so I installed the OS by usb drive instead- started her up, loaded from the usb, the OS loaded ontp my new spiffy 80gb solid state drive, (soo fast!!) and ubuntu flickered on, and EVERYTHING WORKS. The wifi turned on, the power options all worked, the sound AND the sound buttons all worked. EVEN THE WEBCAM WORKS. Sorry for yelling, but even the webcam works. That’s pretty nice- and about a thousand miles from my previous experience trying to install ubuntu 8 on my last computer, a Dell Inspiron.

This is a computer so common every time I go to the airport I see about 20 people with my same machine. This Dell was forever having wifi connectivity problems, and despite the wifi card (a super vanilla intel card) supposedly being supported by both the new and old version’s drivers, ( with forum posts saying that the exact same Dell model worked perfectly for them… ) the only way I got it to work was to install ubuntu 7 on it… never mind that I had to eventually start using the newer version’s package repos, because it was old enough that ubuntu didn’t keep that version’s repos live…. To sum it up, it was a huge pain in the behind. 

Imagine my suprise when I didn’t have to edit any obscure system config files for this new laptop- everything just worked! Did I mention my fn keys even work? Ah, and now that I have a nice video card and ram, all the nice mac style screen transitions work, too. Ahh, I’m going to be so productive and ninja-like on this thing! Not to mention it has that rubberized Darth Vader Empire Black look to it…..