When I bought my laptop two years ago, I thought it would be nice to have a large hard disk, so I could have both Windows XP and Linux side by side. At that time, the standard hard disk was 40Gb. The only laptop I could find with a larger one was a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo D1845. The thing is actually an Uniwill-made 258SAx model, rebranded by Siemens. This must be one of the worst laptops on Earth. It’s noisy and heavy, including the power supply. It is losing its screws all the time and the battery autonomy is a joke. Nevertheless, my accountant says I have to live with it for another 2 years.
The first install I tried with Linux was with CentOS 4. For some reason, it destroyed the hard disk boot sector. I have to say that the computer dealer was kind enough to swap the computer for a brand new one.
I tried again last week to install Ubuntu Linux. The installation went flawlessly. I was impressed with the fact that the whole installation process was as smooth as you would expect from a commercial OS. Only faster and cheaper.
It includes Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice. The Evolution e-mail and calendaring client looks fine. On the whole, I think I could use it as my main platform, were it not for the fact that I still cannot get the built-in WLAN, based on an Intersil ISL3886 chip, to work.
It is apparently detected by the kernel at boot, being assigned the device name “eth2″, and even displayed by ifconfig. I have googled a bit and found out that the chipset is actually not supported in the kernel. One has to use the Windows device driver with NDISwrapper. There is a bug in the ndiswrapper package delivered with Ubuntu 6.10. I ended up downloading megs of source code and recompile ndiswrapper and Gnome network manager etc. Still after all these efforts, I just could not get it to work.
The next step is to try the Linuxant package to see if it gets any better. In conclusion: yes, Linux has made a gigantic step forward in user-friendliness. Ubuntu might even convince your grandmother to switch to Linux. But verify if your hardware is supported.
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