This (almost) marks the end of my running Linux (Ubuntu 6.10) on my laptop. I run Ubuntu at work, so this is more about compatibility than Ubuntu as a distro.

Laptop:

  • HP Compaq Presario v6000-something-or-other (the Core2Duo one with the 100GB HDD)

Good things:

  • Installed without any problems
  • Audio and video acceleration worked out of the box
  • Fast and responsive (well it is a Core2Duo)
  • Only taking 10 minutes to install and play with Beryl

Livable things:

  • Wide screen support. It was only a 5 minute fix, but there are a lot of laptops and desktops with wide screen displays.

The not-so-good things:

  • smbfs (and cifs) suck. Corruption is not acceptable.
  • Wireless support was flaky. I was able to get it too connect, but the speed was low (2.5MB/s over 802.11g) and was unable to get WPA working. The gnome network manager thingy was able to detect networks but never fully connect.
  • Can’t play DVDs. No it not a decoder problem, just lots of seek/reading errors from the DVD drive. Apparently turning DMA off will fix this, but that’s not really a solution.
  • Suspension and hibernation, well, just didn’t work

Now I said almost. 20 minutes ago I whipped out my original XP disks with FCKGW scribbled on the front (because my laptop didn’t come with any discs) and booted up. New laptop = SATA HDD = Drivers needed to detect HDD. So I don’t have a driver CD, or a floppy/floppy drive, and my desktop computer doesn’t have a working burner (Gigabyte DS3 MB with a single PATA channel with two HDDs).

Hmm, perhaps it’s a sign to install Vista :-)