Wvarner
I'm a grad student in philosophy, presently working on my dissertation. I'm also a huge Linux enthusiast, and recently bought Dell's Ubuntu offering: the Inspiron 530. Here I will put tips and experience I've had setting up and using the system.
Dell Inspiron 530 with Ubuntu Pre-Installed
I bought a new computer. the last one I had been using was about 7 years old and painfully slow. I decided it was finally time to dump Windows entirely, and the best way to do this was to buy a computer without it pre-installed. So I decided to go with Dell's line of Ubuntu computers. I've had it for a couple of days and now I'm ready to give my general impressions, experiences, and occational frustrations.
One conclusion that I feel confident in drawing, though (and it doesn't make me happy to say this), is that Dell's Ubuntu desktops are not for the complete computer novice, or even the average computer user. That's not to say that I'm not happy with my purchise (I am!), just that there are a number of issues that still need to be resolved before I can hardily recommend these computers to the average computer person.
First day
It arrives! Yay! I quickly unpack it and look it over. There are a couple of things I notice right away. First, there are only 4 usb connections, and they are all on the back of the computer. Uff. No one uses floppies nowadays, so there should be a USB connection on the front of the machine. And, also, 4 is pretty limited. The mouse, keyboard, printer are all going to get connected through USB connections, which only leaves one for both my flash drive and my external hard drive. Oh well (I'll just buy more USB connections).
Now I boot it up. It asks me a couple of questions and there, I'm in. It looks exactly like I expect it to, except for two small annoyances. First, the default nvidia configuration doesn't center visuals on the center of the screen: The bottom is cut off, and even when I recenter using the monitor controls, it doesn't go up far enough and is still a millimeter off-screen. Second, when I go to Preferences->Screen Resolution, its already set on the maximum resolution (): which isn't maximum enough for me.
Attempts at a resolution
nvidia-settings
Ok, time to get everything set up. First I want to test how everything works out of the box. It detected my printer, external hard drive, and external dvd burner without any problems. Great!
Second day
Oh sh*t!!
Third Day
Now I'm tweaking things so its a fully functional and so I can do everything I want it to. Here is a list of things I set up:
Open *.docx files.
The instructions are found here: [http://wvarner.blogspot.com/2008/02/microsoft-docx-files-on-ubuntu-gusty.html]
Daily Use Since
Overall I'm pretty happy with my system. There are a couple of things that are annoying me, though. Here is my list of the top annoyances:
* Firefox crashes to much. Its crashed at least once a day, often without any heavy usage. Another Firefox annoyance: for whatever reason, the english spell-check dictionary used by Firefox isn't working, so even right now, while I'm typing these words, "everything" is getting a little red squiggley underneath it.
* Nautilus times out while waiting for my external hard drive wakes up, and displays an I/O error message. A clearer description of the error is here: [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/184511]