A Jaunty week
Just over a week ago I upgraded my laptop (a Fujitsu Amilo Li1718) to Ubuntu 9.04, using the release candidate. I found it to be very impressive. Previously I had had to jump through various hoops to get everything working. Now (hopefully) those days are gone.
A peculiarity of this machine is that for the WiFi to work, the hot keys (well, the wireless hotkey) have to work. The machine also has an ATI Radeon Express 200M video chipset.
For Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), I had to follow the notes here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=644899 to get the hotkeys and the wireless to work. I did briefly try using ndiswrapper but that proved too painful to be practical. For 3D graphics I had to use the fglrx closed source driver.
For Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), things were better. The supplied acerhk module supports the hotkeys directly. I still had to build a newer version of the madwifi drivers and use fglrx for 3D.
Now, with Ubuntu 9.04 everything just works. I even go two unexpected bonuses. The first one was that I no longer needed the fglrx driver for 3D, the standard ati radeon open source driver works perfectly. The 2nd bonus was totaly unexpected: - I now have access to the on-board modem (albeit via a closed source driver)! I had forget that this machine has a modem (well to be honest it's not a real modem, more a telephone interface to the sound card). One day, I might even test it!
Overall, I have been so impressed that I have since re-installed the laptop from scratch and deleted the Windows partition, using the entire disk for Linux. My main reason for doing this was that I had realised that the only time I booted into windows was to apply the windows updates (the other reason was to recover the disk space).
So well done to everyone at Canonical for a job well done and delivered on time.
