Journal chill's Journal: Dell Dimension 520N (Linux) 1
I was in the market for another computer and have long since passed thru the "I must build it myself" phase, Dell's new boxes with Ubuntu looked about perfect. Three weeks ago I went on the website and configured a Dimension 520N with Ubuntu. Two weeks ago it was delivered. Here is my impression.
Blah, blah, blah.
I was going to write several paragraphs on exactly how it all went, but it was boring.
Here is the summary.
It all worked flawlessly out of the box. Hell, this is Dell-certified hardware with a pre-installed OS. It should work flawlessly out of the box.
The only hitch was walking my son thru a manual network setting, because I don't use DHCP on my home network. It was only a hitch because I don't know Gnome -- I'm a KDE fan. After that, he opened port 5900 on our firewall and issued a remote help request. I connected thru VNC, activated the "proprietary" repositories, updated everything, added the nVidia binary drivers, Adobe Acrobat, TeamSpeak, Quanta, Flash, Google Earth, Picasa, some Firefox extensions and Kubuntu and had him reboot.
Again, it all worked flawlessly -- binary, accelerated nVidia drivers and all.
America's Army was installed (45 fps with everything maxxed and at 1650x1080 res!), TeamSpeak configured to use the Logitech USB headset (/dev/dsp1), add the network printer (Brother 5020N) and he was done.
Yawn. Not one command line entry, BSOD, Guru Meditation Error or traceback. It all just worked.
Kudos to Dell and Ubuntu. I've got two more kids getting computers this summer, and they're both gettin' Dells.
[Note: It looks like Dell just added another notebook model to the Ubuntu lineup. Now both the Inspiron E1505 and 1420 are options.]
It's about time! :) (Score:1)
A few weeks ago, I was looking for an inexpensive laptop that would run Ubuntu with as few headaches as possible. Since Dell Canada doesn't yet offer pre-installed Linux, I decided to order a sto