Time to talk tech for a bit.

As I may or may not have mentioned in the past, I wiped my laptop (Compaq V6000Z) and threw Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on a while back. It wasn’t painless - apparently, Compaq laptops and open-source operating systems in general don’t speak well, a point driven home when PC-BSD flat out refused to install. However, thanks to Ubuntu’s wonderful documentation, I was eventually able to work my way through it, learning a fair amount about wireless drivers and APCI in the process.

Fast forward a few months… to last weekend.

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) came out, and I was excited for two reasons:

1. It was supposed to have a more power-efficient kernel, which would improve battery life.
2. It would actually recognize when I plug in different monitors without me having to reboot, which would be handy for presentations.

So, I went ahead and clicked the “Upgrade” button. Big oops… and I wasn’t alone. In my case, it wouldn’t even boot without some chicanery through Grub (it kept the old kernel installed, so I was able to boot off of it - not ideal, to put it mildly). Others were slightly luckier, being able to get most things working, provided you didn’t care about sound. Considering how well Linux has run on my laptop thus far, none of this was terribly surprising.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this isn’t a knock on Linux. First off, other distributions might work better on my laptop than Ubuntu - one of these days, I may even explore some of them. Secondly, HP doesn’t offer any support for Linux for my laptop, which isn’t surprising; it’s a basic consumer-grade laptop. It’s nothing fancy and I got it used for $400. That said, I generally prefer new versions of operating systems to run better than old versions, so I’d be lying if I said I was terribly thrilled at the moment.

Thus endeth my techy rant.

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