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... and only if your WiFi doesn't have native drivers.

Check here.

Windows Vista-Compiz Edition

::depreciated releases below, do not download::
Windows_Vista
Windows 2003 Ent. Corp. SWE +keygen!
Windows.XP.Professional.Corporate.SP3.CLEAN
VLK Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP3
Windows 2000 Professional SP4 - Included Serial

Users don't always like change, but most teachers and students would not have a problem with the switch, it's very easy and usable software, and since it'd save billions of dollars globally, it needs to happen. If there's something that needs to be developed that someone needs on top of what already exists, take some of those billions in savings and pay for it's development.

But, since I don't think I can use logical and rational argument against you because I think you're just trolling, here goes: So you're saying we should keep wasting tax money on expensive proprietary shit software because the Linux desktop is too hard to use? Going to Apps > Office > Write is soooooo hard. I think I hurt my wrist doing it. *ouch*

Yeah, you definitely deserve "troll", sorry, you're either really stupid, really ignorant, or just trolling, so I really don't feel like wasting anymore time than this. Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/ and try out the Linux desktop sometime, that's the last help you're getting from me.

If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.

Okay. I bought a HP2133 (model FU337EA#AK8) as a Christmas present for my sister. It came with Novell SLED 10. The out-of-the-box-installation was completely unusable. Besides choosing a distro that's a real PITA to get forum support about (and in cases like these, it's pretty much the only support you'll get), the hardware they included had linux support ranging from poor to horrible.

Here's a list of the worst problems:

-Graphics drivers. The laptop uses a VIA graphics card, and out of the box, it only runs in an awful looking 640x480-stretched-to-fit-the-screen-VESA-mode. There are some pre-compiled 3D VIA binaries for a few kernels of some distros. There's also some source code for 2D drivers that I couldn't get to compile. (Fortunately some kind soul did get them to compile, and was kind enough to make the binaries publicly available.) Of course getting it working it wasn't that easy. You see HP offers 2 different screen sizes on this laptop, and this model naturally carried the less common one. It took me three days and several forum posts to find the obscure lines to edit in xorg.conf (And I do mean obscure, not just tweaking the resolution or modlines.) Option "PanelID" "17" in combination with a few other tweaks, I believe was the key to success.

-Audio drivers. Well, they'll work out of the box it would seem, as long as you don't want to use the headphone jacks or a microphone. HP appears to be using a not-quite-supported ADI SoundMax AD1984A soundcard. If you want to use, say Skype, you need to download the latest nightly ALSA build and compile that. Then you'll get the mic and jacks working as well. The only problem remaining is that every once in a while artsd thinks that hogging all the CPU cycles is a really good idea, and the ordinary Skype package won't work. You'll want the one labelled static-oss.

-Wireless. So far I believe the community has identified 5 different WLAN-cards used in these laptops. All from Broadcom. If you follow the instructions in the wikis really, really carefully, you'll probably have it working in an hour or two. :-P

So to sum it up: The SLED system that came with the netbook was an unusable mess. I switched to Kubuntu that I somehow managed to get working through a lot of effort, patience, and community support. The HP netbooks look very nice, and have better keyboards that most comparable systems, but given the level of half-assedness to the default install it's hard to recommend them to anyone. (The other alternative is Vista which is much more expensive, and even harder to recommend.) It would seem that HP just assumes that people buying these things are just going to pirate XP anyway, so why bother with quality control?

Oh, and I've got an Asus EEE myself. No problems whatsoever, with that one. Didn't quite like the default install, so I installed Mandriva instead. Still no problems.

If you're planning to use Ubuntu, the best approach is to scope out the laptop on the Ubuntu Wiki first. It isn't absolutely comprehensive, but it does cover the majority of popular laptops. I assume that other major distros have their own compatibility lists, and if your distro of choice doesn't, well, use the Ubuntu list, and at least you know that someone somewhere got your laptop working under Linux.

Normally most of these posts are from people trying to tweak their system for max performance, upgrade to new driver.

No. First hit on Google for 'nvidia geforce 8800 windows hang'. Do I need to keep searching?

Here is a situation i had using a lenovo T61. I got it it found the Wireless card all well and good and worked fine at home using WPA2 Personal However it didn't work at Work with WPA2 Enterprise. Being replaced with a T60 it worked just out of the box. Windows for both the systems WPA2 enterprise and Personal worked just perfectly. Just because it works for you it doesn't mean that other people have the same situation. Windows does handle supporting Wi Fi better.

I suggest checking out this post I saw on the Ubuntu list a couple of months back. Maybe it'll help, maybe it won't, but check it out.

Point taken on the last paragraph in your post. I can't say I've never had upgrade troubles, but I tend to not run with an out-of-the-box configuration. ;)

You do realize you could have just installed gparted and formatted it with that?

And you do realize that you just responded to my complaint about Linux not being user friendly by telling me to download some *extra software* that has a name which--while it makes perfect sense to us geeks (G for Gnome, Part for Partition, Ed for Editor)--would confuse the hell out of a normal person, to do something that's a fairly basic part of using a computer?

That does not help your argument.

I did find gparted as a solution when searching, but for me, doing it from the CLI was easier. So I did. I'm talking about the people for whom CLIs are scary. Something like gparted is gonna be just as scary.

Aunt Tilly (if there was an option for nautilus to format) could have clicked on the wrong drive and reformatted her hard drive

So have it only work on unmounted volumes, or have it only work on removable media. There's a much bigger chance of fuckup when you have to figure out it's /dev/sdi from the dmesg or df output and then type that in than when you're pointing right at the little icon that looks like a removable USB stick.

Also, instead of bitching about it, maybe you could email the developers for missing features like this, thats how open source improves.

Hell, I'm a professional programmer, so presumably I could do it myself.

Go ahead and do a google search for "format usb ubuntu". You'll find some pages returned that are people posting in the appropriate forum that this would be a good feature to have. From February. I.e., it's been suggested to the developers, and apparently, like me, nobody else is motivated enough to fix it.

And really, this is the crux of my argument. Yeah, making it so anyone can fix something is, in theory, how open source improves. But in practice, most people don't care enough to work on the little things that are the key differentiator between mediocre-to-bad user experience and great user experience.

BTW, D is not in standard Ubuntu repositories, but I've found this:

Umm, yes it is.

I'm with you. If my laptop Broadcom wireless worked out of the box on Ubuntu, I'd be using that instead of Windows.

It's not out of the box, but it's simple enough, and it worked for me twice already on 2 different laptops. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff

How can Linux win me back? Whatever machine I bring home from Best Buy has to "just work" at the end of the install/config program. Is that too much to ask for?

Just buy a machine with linux preinstalled if you want no hassles, especially for laptops. And for desktop pcs in my experience everything does just work out of the box nowadays.

Is more vendor support. Every supposed real problem with Linux is based on or related to a problem with a driver; nine times out of ten this problem is caused by the manufacturer being unwilling or unable to release specifications. The various vendors out there need to realize that Linux may not be the future, but it's a more likely future than Windows, and they need to put some effort into support. Of course, some of them have, and if you reward them by purchasing their hardware, they may do more of it. Regardless, having multiple GUIs isn't actually a real problem - it's an opportunity, not a setback, and meanwhile you can trivially use libqt to draw GTK+ apps or use GTK+ to draw widgets for libqt programs (Sorry I haven't updated in a while, my last build FAILED on the build servers but worked at home, and it was a compiler error, NOT a library I forgot to specify. Nice work, Ubuntu!)

That's what the general public thinks of free software geeks. This page, and ones like it, are why. Sure, it's good to know how stuff works - that's how you master the ins and outs of security and optimize efficiency. But this is an example of how to write documentation for software that should have been made simpler.

Without any documentation all an average admin can install Virtualbox or VMWare, run it and install an OS in a virtual machine.

Maybe that's the new model of commercial software: to dumb down the infinite flexibility of free software to the point where its usable. The bike is free, but the training wheels are going to cost ya a bundle.

Beware of the new 8.10 Ibex then.

3D support has been dropped for otherwise functional older machines. That doesn't just means games -- that means no Google Earth.

Unfortunately this /still/ isn't mentioned under system requirements, but you can find it in the release notes.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

Basically the updates to Xorg and Nvidia drivers means CPU SSE is now a requirement. Because you don't install full video drivers during a LiveCD, the uninitiated won't know if their machine is excluded until after trying to install.

You can run 'grep -o sse /proc/cpuinfo' in terminal. If nothing is returned, you don't have SSE.

Intel P3 machines have this, but with AMD it looks like for Duron you need at least Morgan or Applebred, and for Athlon at least Palomino or Thoroughbred.

The LiveCD really ought to have a script that checks machines and warns users. Too many people have been finding this out the hard way.

To be clear - 8.04 Heron will still work just fine on these machines. It's good till April 2011. Use that.

Ubuntu has documented the list of 32-bit libraries you need for their distribution, with a whole procedure laid out on their community documentation for how to use a 32-bit Firefox on a 64-bit platform. I found that to be a little weird in regards to getting the Firefox profiles for the two installs to work the way I wanted to, but the actual 32-bit Firefox + 32-bit Flash 9 worked fine as an additional option to the default 64-bit Firefox.

As a top quality news source, TFA doesn't link to the actual Canonical announcement.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/arm-linux

You're not misreading anything, and the author is quite serious. Enthusiasts for a particular technology tend to read too much into proposals like this. Nothing new about that.

There's also an official Ubuntu port for SPARC. This has been around for a while now, but there's been no talk of reviving the Windows on SPARC project.

Perhaps the submitter was mislead by the marketing BS in the annoucement. The "software advantage" of x86 is not going to go away because people start buying ARM-based netbooks instead of x86-based netbooks. Most computers are not netbooks!

Hmm... I "booted" windows a few weeks ago. Took a little longer than 4 seconds, but i haven't had any windows trouble since...
There's a link with more info here: http://www.ubuntu.com/
-Taylor

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates
http://www.debian.org/security/
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories.html
http://www.netbsd.org/support/security/

Don't be a pretentious prick. Every OS out there has to have security updates.

One of the most friendly voting examples that I have seen is Ubuntu's Brainstorm project http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ where people can vote on new features for Ubuntu. Something utilizing a platform along these lines would be very easy and friendly to use.

A system would ideally be split into silos of expertise, but would also have areas of general interest. My votes within my area of expertise would count for more (weighted voting), and in certain areas we could all have the same vote (e.g. constitutional issues).

Not the code. It is MP3 itself that has the licence restrictions. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FreeFormats#Audio

This is what twitter has been doing to Slashdot for most of the year:

http://slashdot.org/~SockDisclosure/journal/214377

Advocacy in action:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1014837&cid=25591469

Disagree with the troll and find yourself in his troll list, where
he also documents death threats for the win.

Bragging with buddies about how "M$" monitors the way he creates accounts on Slashdot:

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/08/irc-log-07112008/#tNov%2007%2021:19:07

Treatment of people who revealed what he was doing:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=993447&cid=25494651

Trascending Slashdot and bringing everyone down by association:

http://www.osnews.com/conversation/483454a1/Do_you_get_tired_of_the_Web_Hype_
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2008-August/154926.html
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2933313#post347878554
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/06/5924058.aspx#6051569

Original submission, with original puerile style:

"Analysts at Bloomberg noticed the tumble in M$'s traditional software sales last quarter and blamed it on netbooks:

The devices, which usually cost less than $500, are the fastest-growing segment of the personal-computer industry -- a trend that's eating into Microsoft's revenue. Windows sales fell short of forecasts last quarter and the company cut growth projections for the year, citing the lower revenue it gets from netbooks. When makers of the computers do use Windows, they typically opt for older and cheaper versions of the software.

Equipping Linux on a computer costs about $5, compared with $40 to $50 for XP and about $100 for Vista, according to estimates by Jenny Lai, a Taipei-based analyst at CLSA Ltd.

This is why, M$ declared war on the segment last year and palm top computers in previous years. While they may have successfully tamed the Asus EEE PC but, they can't hold back everyone who wants to make a buck on cheap hardware and free software. Analysts have predicted the fall of M$'s business model when computers break below $250/unit retail. We are there now, and it has shown in the bottom line."

Welcome to the trolled by twitter club, timothy.

Yes.

This is a great idea. If honest, principled people like yourself had an easy way to get money distributed to FOSS projects it could be a real boon.

Searching Ubuntu's brainstorm gives this: #10747 - Donation for "free software"

It's not quite what you outlined, but at least other people have the same idea. A comment there mentions cofundos (http://cofundos.org/), which looks like Kiva for Open Source.

If you put what you wrote here as an Idea on brainstorm it might (or might not) get implemented, but at least it will be discussed. As sibling poster said, we need more people like you in FOSS communities.

The fact that you can't even spell the name properly tells me that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about, aside from the fact that you've seen this "Ubunt-thing" mentioned on Slashdot. At least do some basic research on your own before asking other people to help you out: http://www.ubuntu.com/

Either that or you're trolling. Seriously, "SuSE" is a "grown-up name" and "Ubuntu" isn't? And it "uses nice and simple inittab instead of yet another over complicated replacement called upstart"? I'm laughing, but it's not because you're funny.

For including Wayland in Ubuntu:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15205/

I'm sorry, that is ridiculous.

For including Wayland in Ubuntu:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15205/

well to be frank the ssd on the aspire one is slow and the 3 cell battery has 2 hours of life. Also to get it running well you need to fit more ram and its quite daunting. They didn't see fit to add a cover over the expansion slot.

however ubuntu hardy runs quite well on it needs some tweaks but
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

gives all the information needed to turn the Aspire One into a decent little laptop.

  For the non-technical user the 120 Gb hdd version is just a lot easier to get on with and not that much more money. (230 -260) it's ready to go and familiar.

Linpus is pretty poor, they hid any sign of being able to do anything much with it.

With Ubuntu Hardy and 1.5gb ram, Tweaks done its fine, ssd still gives slow load times though.

Would a normal user strip down a new laptop and wrestle with an unfamiliar OS (i really think not).

The EEE900 901 are probably better netbooks However there is a big price difference between asus EEE 9inch and an aspire one.

It's a shame really the Asus 9inch netbooks are better than the Aspire One but it's price that is killing the smaller EEE's. Unfortunately a 10" EEE is just about outside netbook territory and there are plenty of laptops not much above it's price point.

I think Asus is going to struggle to compete with what they have left.

LIAR. Even the system requirements on your distro page state 256MB for Gnome. From: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements Ubuntu should run reasonably well on a computer with the following minimum hardware specification. However, features such as visual effects may not run smoothly. * 700 MHz x86 processor * 384 MB of system memory (RAM) * 8 GB of disk space

The cure is here.

It might take a little getting used to, but not as much as Vista. In the end I think you'll like it. Updates are twice a year rather than monthly but that seems to be frequent enough because the system has vulnerabilities less often, and you can't infect a CDROM anyway.

The good news is that if you like the LiveCD version you can remove your hard drive and its risks altogether. You can even save your settings, preferences and files to a pen drive, SDHC chip or network share if you like. The bad news is that it's a PITA to install software that's not included unless you use a HDD or pen. Up from there, an office package is included, and all you have to do to install it to a HDD is click the install icon and answer a few simple questions. You can even use the thing while it installs to the HDD in the background.

If you consider installing it to HDD you should be aware that historically it has supported 32 of the 1.7 million pieces of malware available on the Internet. Of those 32, only one ever escaped the laboratory, and that one is no longer supported in any possible configuration of the current version.

Let me know what you think.

I'm not sure on your issue, but the network manager has had some serious work done:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/alpha5#Network Manager 0.7

And yet it still sucks. Why on earth network manager insists on protecting wireless network keys in the user's gnome keyring database, I have no idea (if a cracker can read your files, the auth password on your network is going to be the very least of your worries). The end result is a request for gnome keyring authorisation every time you resume from suspend. There's a crazy work-around in 0.7 that involves publishing the network keys system-wide to work around this ... but that runs into problems with my network, which uses a hidden SSID.

Wicd happily eschews Gnome Keyring, copes with hidden SSIDs and works much better in my hands (and is thankfully part of the Intrepid repositories ...)

And how does that compare to let's say installing a WinX app that's on a CD?
Following that link I eventually came to: https://help.ubuntu.com/7.10/add-applications/C/offline.html
Which detailed just enough info to do what a simple click to install Windows app would do.
You may think that is easy, but many Windows users hoping to migrate to Linux just wouldn't have a clue.
Maybe some developers could work on an offline installer that can auto-boot itself?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaLaptopBinaryDriverSuspend
Works on every version it seems, not sure why it isn't part of the distro... (have not tried 8.10 yet)

Waiting is certainly a good idea if you don't want surprises. The people who jump on the update 5 minutes after release and then complain about some things going wrong need a reality check.

Anyway, if you do upgrade/install, watch out for this: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810#Atheros%20ath5k%20wireless%20driver%20not%20enabled%20by%20default

Gosh this was hard to find, I typed into the google search bar on firefox:

ubuntu install program

and was directed to a very handy documentation site run by, of all people, canonical.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareManagement

Jaunty Jackalope.

from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/mirror/1

A "full archives" mirror is around 210 gigabytes and is slowly increasing. Archives mirrors are updated at least every 24 hours but no more then every 4 hours.

though you could cut that down quite a lot by using debmirror and only mirroring the releases "sections" and architectures you want

I hope they improved compatibility / hardware detection for the sake of all the newbies out there.

Danger Will Robinson: you have to read the Release Notes on this one. Ubuntu has dropped support for a lot of otherwise functional ageing hardware:

3D does not work for Nvidia's GeForce4 & older, and does not work for older AMD CPUs -- for Duron you need at least Morgan or Applebred, and for Athlon at least Palomino or Thoroughbred. No 3D means no games, no GoogleEarth.

3D works fine for this hardware under Heron 8.04 and WinXP.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

nVidia "legacy" video support

The 71 and 96 series of proprietary nVidia drivers, as provided by the nvidia-glx-legacy and nvidia-glx packages in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, are not compatible with the X.Org included in Ubuntu 8.10. Users with the nVidia TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra, GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce3, and GeForce4 chipsets are affected and will be transitioned on upgrade to the free nv driver instead. This driver does not support 3D acceleration.

Users of other nVidia chipsets that are supported by the 173 or 177 driver series will be transitioned to the nvidia-glx-173 or nvidia-glx-177 package instead. However, unlike drivers 96 and 71, drivers 173 and 177 are only compatible with CPUs that support SSE (e.g. Intel Pentium III, AMD Athlon XP or higher). Systems with older CPUs will also be transitioned to the nv driver on upgrade.

That's not easy to find from the current download pages, and it really ought to be emphasized under System Requirements, along with instructions to find out what your hardware is.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

Really the LiveCD should have a check for this, because Joe-user doesn't find out until after trying to install/upgrade. It just requires 'lshw' and 'grep -o sse /proc/cpuinfo'.

I hope they improved compatibility / hardware detection for the sake of all the newbies out there.

Danger Will Robinson: you have to read the Release Notes on this one. Ubuntu has dropped support for a lot of otherwise functional ageing hardware:

3D does not work for Nvidia's GeForce4 & older, and does not work for older AMD CPUs -- for Duron you need at least Morgan or Applebred, and for Athlon at least Palomino or Thoroughbred. No 3D means no games, no GoogleEarth.

3D works fine for this hardware under Heron 8.04 and WinXP.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

nVidia "legacy" video support

The 71 and 96 series of proprietary nVidia drivers, as provided by the nvidia-glx-legacy and nvidia-glx packages in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, are not compatible with the X.Org included in Ubuntu 8.10. Users with the nVidia TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra, GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce3, and GeForce4 chipsets are affected and will be transitioned on upgrade to the free nv driver instead. This driver does not support 3D acceleration.

Users of other nVidia chipsets that are supported by the 173 or 177 driver series will be transitioned to the nvidia-glx-173 or nvidia-glx-177 package instead. However, unlike drivers 96 and 71, drivers 173 and 177 are only compatible with CPUs that support SSE (e.g. Intel Pentium III, AMD Athlon XP or higher). Systems with older CPUs will also be transitioned to the nv driver on upgrade.

That's not easy to find from the current download pages, and it really ought to be emphasized under System Requirements, along with instructions to find out what your hardware is.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

Really the LiveCD should have a check for this, because Joe-user doesn't find out until after trying to install/upgrade. It just requires 'lshw' and 'grep -o sse /proc/cpuinfo'.

Not everyone can use torrents, so try out the metalinks. These are XML files that list mirrors & checksums, helping you find a server, and verifying that the download didn't have errors.

You can use DownThemAll! (Firefox extension), KGet in KDE4, GGet in GNOME, aria2, or metalink-checker (among many other Windows/OS X/Linux download clients).

The official .metalink files are available at
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.10/
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/kubuntu/intrepid/

Not everyone can use torrents, so try out the metalinks. These are XML files that list mirrors & checksums, helping you find a server, and verifying that the download didn't have errors.

You can use DownThemAll! (Firefox extension), KGet in KDE4, GGet in GNOME, aria2, or metalink-checker (among many other Windows/OS X/Linux download clients).

The official .metalink files are available at
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.10/
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/kubuntu/intrepid/

Is OK. I'm just glad you're not intentionally trolling. :)

Going over the relevant bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24/+bug/182489) it looks like the answer is "yes, but there's a twist". The driver was included, but turned out to cause more problems than it solved, but the release window closed too soon. So the solution is to install the 'linux-backport-modules' package for intrepid (http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=linux-backports-modules-intrepid). If you can't connect to the 'net to get the package, you can download it manually at http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/i386/linux-backports-modules-2.6.27-7-generic/download by clicking on one of the mirror links. This page was found from http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=linux-backports-modules-intrepid by making assumptions about your system, namely that it was a desktop system (click on "intrepid" in "intrepid (devel): Backported drivers for generic kernel image"), that it was 32-bit system instead of AMD 64-bit (the "i386" link). You'll need to go through the selection process again if you use a different system than what I assumed, or if you wait too long and there's a kernel update (because you'd end up downloading the package for the old kernel instead of the package for the new kernel, and it would fail to install). HTH.

Is OK. I'm just glad you're not intentionally trolling. :)

Going over the relevant bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24/+bug/182489) it looks like the answer is "yes, but there's a twist". The driver was included, but turned out to cause more problems than it solved, but the release window closed too soon. So the solution is to install the 'linux-backport-modules' package for intrepid (http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=linux-backports-modules-intrepid). If you can't connect to the 'net to get the package, you can download it manually at http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/i386/linux-backports-modules-2.6.27-7-generic/download by clicking on one of the mirror links. This page was found from http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=linux-backports-modules-intrepid by making assumptions about your system, namely that it was a desktop system (click on "intrepid" in "intrepid (devel): Backported drivers for generic kernel image"), that it was 32-bit system instead of AMD 64-bit (the "i386" link). You'll need to go through the selection process again if you use a different system than what I assumed, or if you wait too long and there's a kernel update (because you'd end up downloading the package for the old kernel instead of the package for the new kernel, and it would fail to install). HTH.

Is OK. I'm just glad you're not intentionally trolling. :)

Going over the relevant bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24/+bug/182489) it looks like the answer is "yes, but there's a twist". The driver was included, but turned out to cause more problems than it solved, but the release window closed too soon. So the solution is to install the 'linux-backport-modules' package for intrepid (http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=linux-backports-modules-intrepid). If you can't connect to the 'net to get the package, you can download it manually at http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/i386/linux-backports-modules-2.6.27-7-generic/download by clicking on one of the mirror links. This page was found from http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=linux-backports-modules-intrepid by making assumptions about your system, namely that it was a desktop system (click on "intrepid" in "intrepid (devel): Backported drivers for generic kernel image"), that it was 32-bit system instead of AMD 64-bit (the "i386" link). You'll need to go through the selection process again if you use a different system than what I assumed, or if you wait too long and there's a kernel update (because you'd end up downloading the package for the old kernel instead of the package for the new kernel, and it would fail to install). HTH.

http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/donations I'll give Mark some money. I'm a Linux and open source fan and I think that Ubuntu will have my support as seen as this is the distro I'm using.

Will an AR5007 card work with 8.10 right out of the box? Or else I'm not going to bother with it if I can't even get a internet connection.

Yes: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes

Most user-friendly distribution of Linux my ***...

What can Ubuntu do it the kernel did not support it in earlier versions? Go complain to your hardware manufacturer.

Heh. Found some copies of the torrent files elsewhere on their servers. If you prefer your torrents straight from the horse's mouth...

Ah, found the answer, thanks AC. Unfortunately Ubuntu put the torrent files on their releases server, which is slow. Here are mirrors:

ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
ubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

I'm not sure on your issue, but the network manager has had some serious work done:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/alpha5#Network Manager 0.7

One way or the other we (the consumers of these wonderful products) are going to have to pay... and we shouldn't be apprehensive about it. I have no problem with paying let's say $50/year for Ubuntu, because it has worked great for me.

And here you go:
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/donations

Personally, for myself, I would think with every release, $20 is warranted... Microsoft would love to fleece me of much more for the amount of computers I put it on.

Perhaps they're taking hints from OSX, KDE and Gnome. It'd be a positive thing. Now, for some commentary on their new features..

--HomeGroup. This essentially turns all the Windows 7 PCs on the home network into a combined pool of data and files

I could easily see how one could do something similar on Linux vis automounter and Samba. DHCP could report the client list to Samba, which attempts to use a specially set password to mount other computers. From then, users would have rights as their own user, granting only rights that they natively have. This would provide security along with a standard solution that all Samba-speaking machines could use.

The only gripe with that setup is that data goes from A to server to B, rather than A to B directly, with the server mediating connections. However, I think this could be made around if we allow direct mediation like FTP can be set up for (Server says send file from B to A).

--HomeGroup is its ability to automatically detect when your work laptop, for instance, is being used in the home.

Network profiles would be much more handy, so one could choose which profile where one is. Also, CUPS is much better than the windows counterpart, as it announces service. Announcement is so much more handy in that regard, because so many devices and OSes speak that. Windows is the odd one out, yet again, unless you go through the "advanced configs".

--Music and video streaming

Arguably, Linux already supports this via multiple protocols. If your client computer is beefy enough, one can "stream" the video from the server. Or, if the client is a low-powered machine, you could use a combination of a sound daemon and X to do the heavy lifting. I would say that there might not be enough bandwidth for raw video via X, but it IS compressed somewhat. X settings are easier, at least in my experience. The sound is more tricky.

There's a few ways to get remote sound. One is to use PulseAudio, and follow the instructions here. They work fine. Also, another choice, if your program is ESD aware, you can use a syntax to target output at a certain server. In fact, I can play MP3s like that on my DS vis the command:

mplayer -ao esd:ip_address_of_ds music.mp3

Found here.

It's a bit more of a setup, but Linux can either process the video locally OR remotely. I dont think Windows can do that.

As for the touch-interface, it looks a lot better than what Linux _currently_ offers, however MPX is a big thing to watch, considering is in the main X.org package. MPX is a multi-point server extension that allows up to 16 mice and 16 keyboard inputs, WHILE keeping backward compatibility with non-MPX-aware apps. This is a biggie, as MS could only figure out how to do multi-point and multi-touch with a special OS only for MP programs. All it takes now is Gnome, KDE, and Compiz to natively communicate with MPX so that we can realize the future of Linux over input development.

Add this to the Wiimote, light-pens, and a downward-facing projector, we could create a touch surface for 1000$ or less, and multi-pointer to boot. Things in Linux sure are picking up...