I've discovered a few things (quirks, if you will) about Ubuntu and laptops. I've just taken the plunge and added the Debian unstable repositories. So now my distro is a weird hybrid of Ubuntu and Debian/SID.
The newer ACPI tools and acpid fix some of the problems with monitoring, but on the whole, acpi is pretty much a dead beastie. For a laptop, that's not particularly good news, since I don't get any battery alerts and have to count the hours/minutes since I booted (or have the laptop suddenly shut down with no warning).
For some inexplicable reason, wireless refuses to work in Linux. Well, no. Let me qualify that. Wireless works, just that put in a WEP key of any size and it won't work. I've tried most of the standard fiddling with iwconfig and cousins, even edited the network interfaces, but nope. Encrypted wlan is a no-no.
Hmm. What else. The new XFCE 4.2 is tasty. But it won't run properly on the standard Ubuntu. Cardbus services seem to be a on again off again proposition. if I auto eth0, it takes nearly a minute to figure out a DHCP address, so I've resorted to leaving it off and explicitly turning on networking when I need it. Not very convenient, but considering how many times I boot to and fro, it's a timesaver. Upgrading to kernel 2.6.10 borked my soundcard and I haven't figured out why yet.
Remind me why I'm going through all this instead of running a perfectly reasonable Windows XP ? Because even with all of the hassle, I'm still ... somehow ... more productive on the Linux bootup than I am on Windows. I suspect that upgrading my command shell to something like 4NT might solve a few of the Windows woes, though. Am I just an apologist ? Someone who applauds the dancing bear routine? Maybe.
