There are two ways around this in Ubuntu 11.10 (and, I'm assuming, derivative distributions). One way is to install from a PPA (that's the most likely answer you'll get if you search for a remedy online). I don't really like that idea, so I sat down today, did some research, and figured out how to install the latest version (1.6.0-30) directly from the Oracle website. It is not a trivial process, if you are a relative amateur like I am. Why does an amateur like me care? Because a very common mathematics learning software (ALEKS) requires Sun Java to run. I teach using this software, and although I could run a VM to access their system, I'd rather not. If anyone cares, here's what to do, after you download the appropriate .bin file from Oracle:

chmod +x jre-6u30-linux-x64.bin
./jre-6u30-linux-x64.bin
sudo mkdir /opt/java
sudo mkdir /opt/java/64
sudo mv jre1.6.0_30/ /opt/java/64/jre1.6.0_30
sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/opt/java/64/jre1.6.0_30/bin/java" 1
sudo update-alternatives --set java /opt/java/64/jre1.6.0_30/bin/java
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
sudo ln -s /opt/java/64/jre1.6.0_30/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so


PS I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but it worked. I pieced this together off of the web - none of it is original.

This weekend, I went to Office Depot, bought an HP 2000 laptop for about $329, brought it home, backed up the windows image, and installed Ubuntu 11.10. All of the conditions of his post are met. Battery life is good, fan is quiet, sound works, closing the laptop lid causes the machine to sleep, etc. Not sure what he means about backup - I use grsync which is easy enough to back up my home directory to a flash drive (primitive, I know, but I've never been burnt). No special configurations were necessary to install Ubuntu. It's funny that people keep bringing up WiFi. The last time I had problems with WiFi on Linux was a Broadcom chipset on Ubuntu 8.04. After that, everything has worked without issue (and I could get it working by extracting / copying firmware). Sometimes I think a lot of the Linux complaints about sound and wifi are out of date.

I'm not sure what "AppleCare" is unless it's some sort of extended warranty / replacement program. Unless you're very unlucky, a decent laptop is cheap enough that you're better off self-insuring. While it might make sense for an Apple product (I'm being generous) I don't think it makes sense for a basic laptop workstation.

Most of them use federal loan dollars as their primary revenue source. They probably won't survive otherwise. My guess is they will lobby as hard as they can to avoid it.

There seems to be a lot of Unity-bashing around here, but I suspect that very few people have actually used it for an extended period of time. I have and do. It is really not that bad. I do "work" with my system; probably not the intensive coding tasks that many others do, but tasks that require me to be running and switching between multiple applications at the same time. It works. There are bugs, yes, but 11.04 is not an LTS. There needs to be an active user community working with it, so that it gets better. I am confident that 11.10 and 12.04 are going to be major improvements. I am not running it on anything special - a T4300 pentium with 4GB of ram. The performance is fine - much better than Windows 7 on the same machine.

I did switch to Xubuntu and liked a lot of things about Xfce, but went back to Unity because of the great keyboard shortcuts. If I want to run Octave, it's a matter of quickly typing super-o-c and pressing enter. I can also bring up websites pressing the super key, typing the URL, and pressing enter. I realize it would be scandalous for Linus to use Ubuntu, but I won't be surprised if other distributions start offering Unity.

I have three to four students per year (that's about 2% of my students) try to friend me. They are all turned down. Parents are usually notified too, because it makes me feel a little creepy (incidentally, I'm male, and all the requests have been from males; I think the girls are better at knowing it's creepy). It used to just be my policy, now it's the administration's policy. The teachers are almost universally a fan of this policy. Some teachers started course accounts on Facebook, separate from their personal accounts. What would be much better is to deploy technology with similar functionality on school networks, so that the school has control and supervision of the content. The kids can contact me through two separate legitimate channels (regular email and our web grading system), both of which I check more frequently than my Facebook account, with questions about grades, homework, course material, etc. These channels are monitored for everyone's protection. I agree with other posters though - most teachers already are not doing this, and school boards are making it policy already. The legislature probably wanted to make sure everybody was covered, and I can understand where they're coming from.