[Hampshire] Report on Tesco Ubuntu machine

Hi folks,

After three weeks waiting for stock to come in, I finally took
delivery of a £139 Tesco machine with built in Ubuntu (actually they
gave me 10% off because the case was a bit dented so it ended up
costing just £126). Probably worth the money for the moment when they
said, "You do realise it doesn't have Windows?" so we could
reply, "That's exactly why we want it".

However...

I'm afraid it would probably not be a good first introduction to Linux
for its target audience. As it's the first PC I've bought as a
complete machine I was expecting a 'turn on and go' experience.
Trouble is that it comes without a monitor and it boots up with the
screen resolution set to 1600x1200, so both my (fairly new, fairly
good) LCD monitors complained 'Signal out of range' and gave a blank
screen. Of course I simply Ctrl-Alt-F1 and nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
and took out the higher resolutions. Can't see a novice managing
that. Also can't see many people who are buying a £139 PC having a
1600x1200 monitor lying around at home!

Once that was done it was straight to a login screen asking for a
username and password. Neither was in evidence in any of
the 'documentation' (one sheet offering support for £99 a year and
the motherboard booklet). Luckily we guessed it was esys/esys or it
would have been Ctrl-Alt-F1 time again!

Another source of fun for the unwary would be the pretty-looking CD
with some DVD application software ..... for Windows!

That got us into Ubuntu Dapper, default mud brown with its rather
childish theme. OpenOffice was at 2.0, Firefox at 1.5 so I went for
an upgrade. NOT an easy process; I think it would have been quicker
just to download the install CD and start from scratch but I was
nervous about losing what I had working. I ended up using aptitude as
I found both the package managers (Adept and Synaptic) very
cumbersome in comparison. It took a lot of goes round the block and a
few dpkg -i of individually downloaded packages to upgrade to Gutsy.
There were two or three times where files had moved between packages
which often gets apt in a circular frenzy. I only had to reboot once
though!

Through all this I stuck with Gnome, thinking I'd eventually see the
point, but in the end I cracked and installed kubuntu-desktop. It
took four minutes over a wireless connection to download and
transformed Ubuntu into Kubuntu. Much more to my liking. I can't say
I think much of the Kubuntu replacement for kcontrol though - it
seems to be missing lots of the controls and doesn't seem to have
gained anything in the process.

Several things really impressed me:

1) The PC is virtually silent - FAR quieter than the laser printer
next to it. It's got a huge circular Intel cooler on the CPU, the fan
hardly has to move.
2) The inside is well laid out with the cables attached to the case
with cable ties
3) It's really easy to get into the case (once you're removed the
annoying 'warranty void if...' sticker) and there's plenty of room
for expansion: 3 PCI, 1 AGP, 1 spare DDR 2 slot, one spare drive bay,
one spare CDROM bay, one empty FDD bay. There's SATA on the m/b but
no SATA power connector so you'd need an adapter. The on-board
graphics and sound are fine for office use.
4) The keyboard is very nice and has a bank of special keys for
volume, play/pause, start browser etc WHICH ALL WORKED! The mouse is
a nice enough optical job.
5) The wireless card worked immediately with a reasonably obvious GUI
to set the IP etc.
6) I was amazed when I plugged in our two USB printers and up popped a
message saying they'd been configured and installed. Things have
certainly moved on since I last started from scratch! Similarly our
Logitech Skype headset plugged in and worked; and two essential
Windows apps worked under wine so there was no need to arrange a dual
boot.
7) The Kubuntu theming and general look and feel are very well done,
with gtk apps like jpilot blending in much better than I've managed
on my Debian system.
9) But best of all of course, I bought a PC with Linux installed on
it. Still seems cool to me!

ATB, Peter