Some quickies for you:
- I bought a Dell M1330. Unfortunately I put in the order a week before the Ubuntu availability was announced, so I did not get an Ubuntu pre-installed one. Not that it mattered, I never even booted Vista – Gutsy was on there quicker than you can say “they drink it in the jungle“. It is an excellent laptop – I went for the Intel graphics one to support the free drivers. Everything works out of the box, apart from Compiz – I had heard of some driver issues with the Intel card, and I am sure this will be fixed soon.
- I did an interview about Ubuntu for ComputerWorldUK. Go and read it here.
- More and more speakers for LugRadio Live USA 2008 are confirming – I will announce them in another blog entry.
- Overkill are playing Bloodstock! This makes me happy – they are one of my fave bands, and I have only ever got a chance to watch them once over in the UK.
- In a week I head to SCALE and then to San Francisco. In between I will be doing a Google Tech Talk.
More soon…
Looks like this machine has the Intel X3100, yes? My Thinkpad T61 has the same card. As I understand it, Compiz support for the X3100 has been blacklisted due to some problems with accelerated video support under Compiz. However, if you can live without the fastest video acceleration, you can remove the X3100 from the blacklist on your computer, change your video output plugin to the slow “X Window System (No XV)” and then Compiz works great. I’m using it on mine with no problems (your mileage may vary).
This forum thread may help: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=616280
Enjoy your new laptop!
You can get compiz to work, but you will not be able to play videos. I can’t remember where it is, but they have a wiki with known problems and solutions. Turning something off in some config file makes compiz work, but as I said, it kills the ability to play video.
I thought it was “they drink it in the congo” ??!
If the video is i965 (x3100 intel) then its the same as my HP 6720s, recently (only yesterday) blogged about 🙂
Ubuntu is at this moment seriously in limbo between the old and the new Intel drivers. Earlier the old one was defaulted but people can’t get any of the new shiny stuff accelerated with it. Then the newer one were made default, just to notice problems with video playback. Then some people got best of the both worlds working (depending on their chipsets) and what Ubuntu developers decided to do was to go for blacklisting and hoping for best instead of solving the actual root causes. Not actually killing the old driver for good will have grace concequences for the Linux adoption of a huge potential user base.
Remember that Intel is the most used display adapter chipset family of them all, with over 60% market share. Even smallish bugs touch instantly great amounts of users. So, either video playback problems or problems with the new shiny effects… Or both.. There being 1,3 billion target PCs for Ubuntu that means roughly 700 million PCs at this moment have very plain crappy experience with the display adapter support!
It’s a real shame the next LTS release will suck in the exactly same way. It will be around for a long time and we will be seeing huge amounts of duplicate bugs about the same problems repeating all over and over again. What should worry more is the literally millions of potential users that go back to other operating systems because the most important thing – display adapter support – did not simply work out of the box.
From user perspective display adapter support is extremely important because the focus of the users senses is often 110% on the display and on everything what happens there. It’s our most important sense in many levels. Even the smallest glitch there really bugs people whether they realize it consciously or not.
Jono, curious why you didn’t look at System76 for a laptop? A lot of people are raving about them and how Ubuntu works great with all the hardware etc.
System 76 are US only, and to get it shipped and pay the customs tax would cost a small fortune. It also makes it more difficult to get it fixed. The M1330 is a nice looking machine, did you get the conventional or LCD display?
Jesse (Comment #3): I’m guessing that Jono was following the only reason people go Dell… price. There are better options out there in every respect, but they struggle to be anywhere near as competitive as Dell on price.
Jesse, the last time I checked, system76 didn’t ship to Europe. 🙂
But did you fight Dell for your MS tax rebate?