Afternoon All!
Just a quick follow up on our efforts to install Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit on
Ellen's new Acer 5735z laptop (which originally surfaced in a post about
obtaining a refund from Acer for the unused Vista Basic license).
Well, in short it was a very smooth install with fairly small hurdle in
the form of the drivers for the RaLink RST 2860 STA based wireless NIC,
which was easily overcome with these [1] instructions. Everything else
worked out-of-the-box, including the oft bothersome business of the
graphics drivers and automatic selection of the correct screen resolution.
Ellen is very happy with all aspects of the machine, which is good
seeing as she is coming from a nice dual-core desktop machine with 2GB
RAM, no slouch itself. We have still to investigate some of the more
exotic aspects of the machine (bluetooth, hibernate and suspend come to
mind), but the remaining basic functionality is all there from the outset.
Looking around the price [2] appears to be reasonably good for a machine
that you can tuck under your arm and walk away with, although some of
the big players are getting close to bettering it. Fortunately Ellen's
10% staff discount soon saw them off!
To summarise, a nice machine that, for the most part, just works, and
where it doesn't is reasonably easily fixed.
Finally, Ellen opted for the easy life as she wanted to get out of the
boy's bedroom at the earliest opportunity (where her desktop PC
currently resides due to a lack of space anywhere else in the house), so
we did not follow up with Acer on the £20 refund that would cost us £20
to obtain! I may may still direct a whinge-o-gram to Acer's UK boss on
that matter if I get the time.
Sean
[1]
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=683085&page=5
[2]
http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-3481.aspx
--
The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
Frank Zappa
