[thechat] laptops for linux

[William Anderson]

John Handelaar wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> I recently "acquired" a Dell Latitude D505 which came from Dell Outlet.
> Super-cheap.  (Back when I had to buy PCs for a 150-person company we
> opted never to go for a warranty longer than a year though - on the numbers
> we found that if it doesn't die in 6 months it probably never will.  YMMV
> of course.)
> 
> Ironically it crashed like a three-wheeled stock car every 10 minutes
> or so under XP, Dell drivers, OEM OS version and all.

Interesting, my work D505, which you've personally played with, is
pretty damn stable on xp pro sp2 (touch wood).

> Ubuntu, on the other hand, picked up all the hardware, sound and all,
> with no effort whatsoever (except the winmodem, which I don't care about
> anyway).  Even goes into standby when I close the lid.

Yeah, Ubuntu on the D505 kicks arse.  In fact Ubuntu on most things
kicks arse: just make sure you install 5.10 Breezy and not any earlier
version, for obvious "more things work better than ever" reasons.

> A person could use kubuntu on this if desired, but tbh if I wanted program
> menus with thousands of entries on a butt-ugly silver theme, I'd have left
> XP on it...

/me knows the guy responsible for Kubuntu :>

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