I had to replace my 5+ yrs old Dell Inspiron 8000 because the display cable broke. I went shopping and finally decided to buy a HP Compaq nw 9440. Nice machine. Of couse it came with XP "preinstalled". I erased this soon after unpacking and installed Ubuntu 6.10.
Works mostly fine, although there are still some minor issues with ACPI Standby. It would be nice, if HP Compaq could be convinced to deliver these machines with Ubuntu preinstalled. ;-) Some examples which I think needed to be improved in Ubuntu: * Third party software vendors still have problems to package software for installation on Linux systems. By default Ubuntu still mounts CDROMs with ``noexec`` and users have no choice to even execute an "install.sh" or a "Run_me_first.sh" on a software CD. This is too paranoid for the average desktop user. * Third party Software vendors have no easy way to figure out, which version of Ubuntu is installed on a particular computer in order to deal with backward compatibility issues: There is no ``/etc/Ubuntu_version`` and the file ``/etc/debian_version`` still tells ``testing/unstable``. * Plugged a DV-Camera into the firewire port: I (as an experienced user) had no problem to figure out, why I had no permissions on /dev/raw1394 and that I had the choice to either add me to the group ``disk`` or modifiy ``/etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules`` and taking the risk, that some other user might eventually gain root priviliges by plugging a rogue firewire disk into my notebook. But what about Joe Randomuser who simply wants to make a DVD with some recordings of his kids (I use ``kino`` a rather great program BTW)? But I guess that the average Joe Randomuser still has problems to figure out what to do with the CDROM, that came with his Canon, Sony or whatever Camera which simply says, that Windows 98/nt/2000/xp is required to run the included software package. Enough ranting. Ubuntu is marvelous, but there is still work to be done. Regards, Peter Funk -- Microsoft has a majority market share https://launchpad.net/bugs/1 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
