Great. So now MS gets to control what OEM's will sell in a market that they aren't even well suited to thrive in. It sucks cause I bet it will work. OEM's are going to want the cheap windows licenses for netbooks, so they will of course make netbooks that fit MS's definition of what a netbook is. Otherwise, no windows starter edition. That means that even if there could be amazing-new-cpu x that happens to have great-new-capability y is absolutely perfect for a new-generation netbook-like product, but it would have to run at 17watts and 1.3ghz, it will never receive any notice from netbook makers. OEM's will want NOTHING to do with it just because they can't offer windows on it, since regular non-starter edition windows 7 will run terrible on it. That means that another potential advance in technology won't occur. Why can't MS instead let OEM's choose which of their OS's they want to install on which hardware, and not have to worry about future developments in tech as much. Just dumb if you ask me. Even from a windows user point of view, this isn't an ideal situation, but for other OS's it's more grim still. The fact that these specs are out means a couple things. Mainly that MS has probably known it was going to design for these specs in the first place, and tuned OS features and performance SPECIFICALLY for this hardware definition, since they could bet this would become an industry standard once they did release the spec. For other OS's, this means that any os-feature-or-program x that they planned to include in the future once netbooks got a bit more powerful/better or would require slightly higher or even just different specs to run well won't be used on this platform. It essentially gives other OSes a late start, since now they have to rethink what they should develop/how they should develop it for this market in the first place to fit a particular definition of what the platform even is, since they know it will now get no better than that spec anytime soon. Yeah, some OEM could adopt a netbook that isn't windows7 starter compliant, but honestly, even with an amazing amount of effort integrating really impressive features by some other OS community, how successful could you bet on that netbook will being? Probably not very. OEM's know that, and they wouldn't gamble unless a large portion of their customer base told them they wanted something like it. The whole situation sickens me.

Not sure precisely which bugs you mean, but I have an inspiron 1525 with that graphics chipset, and it seems to be doing just fine. Compiz works, and I haven't seen the transparency issues (like the volume changer looking funny over fullscreen video w/ compiz on) that I used to have pre-ibex. It seems to be easier on my graphics chip than was ibex too.

It's true. Dual monitors in linux with gnome have been a real pain compared to Windows or OS X. I've always hated the fact. HOWEVER, I'm excited, because ibex does things with dual screens right (or at least tons better) on my laptop that previously in hardy didn't work right at all. Details: 1.) Hardy wouldn't let me switch to dual screens if I started up with just the laptop screen unless I killed X (by whatever method) and then logged back in. NOW, I have to kill X the first time after it sets up a virtual screen for me, and then it's fine after that. 2.) If I fullscreened or maximized a window in hardy on a dual screen setup, it would maximize across both screens usually (but not always...). This isn't the case now, and everything but flash vids will fullscreen in the window they previously existed in (with the exception to flash...which has a bug, and will go on your primary display...grrrrrr) 3.) In hardy, my dual monitor setup would have to be tweaked manually to be useful, because the screen resolution gui did NOTHING on my chipset. This seems to have been fixed. It worked just fine with NO xorg.conf tweaking. Your millage will probably very, but I really hope not cause I'm really quite satisfied. I'm running a pretty well supported dell inspiron 1525 with intel 965gm graphics (also known as x3100) with both 32 bit and 64 bit ibex beta, latest updates.