I have tried all the distros on this laptop, none compare to Gutsy Gibbon running on it, I did have problems with Fiesty. I just put it down to the fact now that Dell are involved with Ubuntu they have to get Gutsy running just grand or they will blow their chance with Dell which would be a shame.

Dunno what the problems were, but if you were having consistent problems with an install – it might be a problem with the copy of the distro you’re using. Other than that, without log information… clueless. I’d check out the forums someone suggested above, too. If there’s a known issue, someone may leap at it.

HP Pavilion ze4200 laptop, powered by a 1.53-GHz Athlon XP-M 1800+ processor.

It’s also got 256MB of DDR SDRAM, a 20GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW drive and two USB 1.1 ports.

While this might seem like a light configuration today, it’s more than capable of running Ubuntu.

The 20-GB drive is well above Ubuntu’s 4-GB disk-space requirement.

The 256-MB of memory exceeds the 64-MB minimum posted on the main Ubuntu installation page, though it only just meets the minimum spec on the 7.04 release notes.

Basically my issues with Ubuntu came down to me not checking for hardware compliance.

I’ve done a ton of Fedora, FreeBSD and Slackware installs without issues, so I just assumed a few things and it caused problems.

To be fair, for me to determine whether or not Dell made a good decision with Ubuntu, I need to get my hands on a Dell system pre-loaded with it.

I’ve had the entirely opposite experience too many times to count. I read your blog post, and thought “Geez, he must have been doing something wrong, or he’s entirely too fanboy-ish.” I’ve installed Suse 10 and Ubuntu Edgy (comparing the older Ubuntu because Suse 10 is old) about the same amount of time (100+) and I’ve had problems with the Ubuntu once or twice, but I’ve ALWAYS got something to do with Suse. These are all on newer Dell boxes at work, as well as all my installs at home, so it is an apples-to-apples comparison.

Also, with Suse 10, the moment I stopped using the desktop environment it shipped with (KDE) for my own environment, I lost YaST (except for the broken ncurses version) and all the other things that are so nice about Suse. I can ALWAYS use synaptic or adept no matter what my environment looks like. Free as an Freedom is the idea, and I never get that feeling with Suse.

Paul

What was the model of laptop? I’ve never had a problem with Ubuntu on a laptop, but I know Linux can be finicky at times.

But that’s just me, and i’ve been mucking around in Linux for a couple of years now, so I guess it’s all relative Some of the reason i like using Linux part-time is that whenever I want to do something new or different with it, it can still provide a challenge or puzzle every now and then — but i never ran into anything too hard with Ubuntu. But again, i came in with Linux experience & formatted again pretty quickly.

Despite that, I would gladly use Ubuntu as my primary operating system except for one small thing I need: an IE emulator that works. Without access to IE, there is no way for a web developer to reasonably guarantee quality testing.