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 (and I'll try to keep it updated).
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! I put in a DVD and it read it without any problems. So far so good. Now I'd try some things I figured would give the system some trouble, like: browsing around to multimedia rich sites like cnn.com and the bbc to see if I could play videos from those sites. No surprise: I couldn't. Time to wrestle with the multimedia problems that are always a hastle when configuring a Linux system.
Second day
Oh sh*t!! I got up, installed a couple of updates, and rebooted the computer. But instead of it restarting like normal, it stopped functioning right before (or maybe during) it initialized the grub boot loader, and refused to boot up. I had no idea what caused this malfunction, but now I've got to deal with it. I figured the grub configuration had been corrupted, so my plan was to insert the Ubuntu CD that came with the Dell and fix the boot loader. Unfortunately, though, it wouldn't boot up correctly. It would start off fine, but then it would give something like the following error and then reboot:
Its not the CD, because I tested it on my laptop and the cd boots fine...now on this pc it wont boot at all. it gives me these errors after i tell it to boot the cd/install.
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off ata2.01: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4) ata2.01: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4) ata2.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x40)
Uff!
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]
- When booting up, sometimes my system will get stuck at the beginning of the initialization of Ubuntu, and then it will reboot itself in about 20 seconds. And sometimes it will do this 2 to 3 times before it actually boots up the way its supposed to.