..::B:R:A:D::..

My impatients was really starting to kill me. I was checking the Dell site almost every 20 minutes to see if they had updated the status on my laptop. When I left work I was a bit peeved because the Dell site still stated that my order was “In transit to local shipping facility”. It had been on that same status since late Friday. In fact it still says that! Almost as soon as I got home I heard a knock on the door. Much to my surprise it was the UPS man with a Dell box for me!

Of course the first thing I did after I got it out of the box was planning on how to get rid of the Windows virus which was graciously installed by default by Dell. I had the Linspire and Ubuntu LiveCD’s sitting on my desk so I tried those first. Surprisingly the Linspire LiveCD setup everything flawlessly. The display was properly set to 1280×800 and the wireless connection worked without any tweaking or configuring. Ubuntu on the other hand, as nice as it is, did not do either of the two….but I was not about to go buy a copy of Linspire to put on here so I stuck in my Ubuntu 5.0.4 install cd and away we went.

Moments later I was greeted with Ubuntu’s GDM login screen. I then set forth to configure it to my liking (installing my favorite apps, correcting the display, and getting the wireless working). All in all it wasn’t much of a challange to fix the two issues but it really is just a pain to have to do it in the first place.

I am really liking the widescreen on this thing…very nice. Overall though I feel the Apple iBook feels like a much more solid notebook. Some aspects of the 700M just seem cheap. Though I am not complaning since I got this thing almost half off! I sure hope i can disable the touchpad in the BIOS though…I always use a mouse (even got a new usb wireless mouse just for this laptop) and prolonged typing always manages to mess things up by placing my curser somewhere totally random becuause my hand slightly brushes the touchpad…annoying.

I am really looking forward to at least testing Novell’s SuSE 9.3 Professional on here. As long as everything such as the screen resolutionand wireless networking works it may be a heated competition between SuSE and Ubuntu.

*Dell 700M Gallery

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Linux. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.