Computx.us linux notes

In case you are wondering, my old blog died an early death. I installed a new version of serendipity and in the process I lost all the old articles. It happens.
...and sometimes it runs down hill.

I recently picked up a new (to me) laptop. Of course The first thing I did was put linux on it. Normally I am a Gentoo guy but I really didn't want to devote a weekend to compiling everything when there was grilling and stuff to do so I decided I would try out Ubuntu's latest effort. I had briefly tried "hoary" and had played with "breezy" for a bit longer but they just didn't fit my needs at the time.
I decided to download the live / install cd as I could get an idea of what the hardware support would be before I installed.
The laptop is a Thinkpad T23. I knew linux support was decent on thinkpads but the wifi card was a netgear wbg511. There are countless horror stories on the net about getting this to work in linux so I didn't really expect dapper to set it up at all. I slipped in the live cd, booted and Holy Cow! wireless networking was working. Then I discovered my thinkpad volume control keys were working too. I was very impressed. I proceeded to do the hardware install, then apt-get Automatix which is a script to add multimefia codecs and other "nice things"© to ubuntu. About 35 minutes later I had an install that worked with all my hardware. Even suspend to ram was working. Compare that to a weekend of compiling gentoo plus desktop. Viva le difference. see below for a picture of the thinkpad.

Since then I have used the alternate install cd to put dapper on my desktop and it is working equally as well. I still like using gentoo on my server but am blown away by Dapper's desktop. Now if we could just get them to rethink the naming schemes.

Yes I know these pictures are bad. Best I could do in low light at the time.