So I knew Ubuntu was good, just see my last two posts. But I had no idea it was this good.

I took the liberty of installing it on my HP ze4600 laptop tonight. Popped in the CD, booted it up, clicked enter, and it hung. Repeat, hangs again. Guessing it’s an APCI problem, add a noirq to the boot command line, no go. Google around, see the F1 key is options before boot, and there it says add “noapic nolapic” to the boot command. Voila.

Normal install, quick and dirty. Boot up for the first time after installation is complete.

What’s this? My Synaptic touchpad is working? Double-clicking the pad is just like double tapping the mouse button. Awesome! I never did get this to work on FC2.

Looking up at the panel I see the wireless networking strength meter. Interesting, mouse over shows it sees device ath0, my D-Link AG660 PC Card that’s in there! (I don’t use the Broadcom builtin 54G, bad Broadcom for not supporting linux!) Fire up the networking settings, add the ath0 and WEP key, disable the ethernet, and wham! bang! Full wireless network support!

I spent days hacking at madwifi getting that to run on FC2. The first FC2 install I had it worked fairly easily, but after a reinstall I couldn’t get madwifi / atheros support to work to save my life. And here’s a distribution that installs this stuff by default.

I am going to make it a priority to get my music re-tagged, organized, backed up, and migrate my server over to Ubuntu in the next month or two. I’m in love, swept off my feet, by a polished, linux distribution run by Canonical, powered by Debian. I’m in awe of the work they’ve done, and am going to support them as much as I can.