I bought a new laptop a few weeks ago from the hp uk website (under 550 quid incl VAT and Delivery) and have been setting it up as my main machine to take over from my trusty ECS desknote.
My desknote is actually surprisingly well designed for a working laptop, for instance the Linux Support is great - RH9 had all but the winmodem working out of the box, the trackpad is deeply inset and tap-to-click works correctly as well. Best of all is that the del, home, pageup, pagedown and end buttons form a column to the right of the backspace,hash,return and shift keys. The keyboard layout is far superior to that of the HP laptop I have got, but no other laptops seems to have such a well thought out keypboard design. At least the new HP laptop is black and slimmer and has a wider screen and far longer battery life, and of course a shedload of disk, ram and processor.
Anyway, for the last week I have been trying to make Ubuntu 5.04 work well enough for me to use my new laptop for may day job.
The install was pretty smooth (only 1 CD), but it was text based and there was no clear explanation of how to log in as root.
Then I noticed that the tap-to-click on the trackpad behaved very oddly and the trackpad itself was super sensitive. The trackpad when tapped would middle click - very very annoying. I managed to turn off tap-to-click but I have used that feature for about 2 years and it immediately pissed me off.
Once I tried to get on with the rest of the setup I had to jump through a dozen hoops just to install one of my own CPAN modules (no compiler is installed, CPAN modules don't install normally you have to install debian packages instead).
Finally it was a real pain to find the debian packages for pptp and pptpconfig, when I eventually did find them I still couldn't get it to connect to the VPN I use for work.
Now I have just installed Fedora Core 3 and I still get the middle button behaviour for tap-to-click but I can at least debug it properly using the synaptics programs.
...More to follow later in the week.
-Dom
Re:Sudo
TeeJay on 2005-04-13T13:12:26
yes, its quite good for newbies and very OS X in style.
But even though I've had some issues on Redhat (same problem with trackpad, and I killed the kernel by applying an RPM for a different version) it seems much nicer
Horses for courses, I also use RH at work so using RH on my workstation is probably going to save hassle.
