trouble with its Wifi, one had trouble with both its CD-ROM and Wifi,
and one has issues with the sound-card.
None of these are highly sophisticated H/W (imagine trouble with CD-ROM).
I would just have returned those as defective. *If it doesn't work,
return it*.
Your problem was most likely with the motherboard though.
But in atleast two of the cases the problem got solved with the very
latest versions of GNU/Linux. The Wifi card which was not working in
FC5 started functioning in Ubuntu Dapper and the latest Knoppix, while
the unresponsive CD-ROM had no problems in the latest Knoppix.
It is true that geeks & hackers with some effort can fix most of these
issues. I don't claim to be a geek, but I feel even those belonging
to the 'uber' class would not always have the time to manually rectify
their hardware problems.
After all, 'out-of-the-box' is a good thing to have, and Ubuntu has
achieved it to a large extent.
Cheers,
Debarshi
--
"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.
That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"
-Jean Kerr
--
http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
