On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 12:36 +0100, Barry Drake wrote: > Hi there ..... > > I've been lurking and listening for a while. You seem a friendly group, > so I thought I'd leap in. > > A couple of weeks ago I bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v pre-loaded with > Ubuntu. Now I've got it working as I want I have to say I'm over the > moon with the product. But I fail to understand the attitude of Dell. > They seem to act as though the only sell Linux products grudgingly. > Before I bought, I wanted to know what flavour of Ubuntu I would get. > With difficulty, the sales team were able to confirm that it would come > with Hardy 8.04. 'What flavour' was a question they simply didn't > understand!
Well, I suppose that they consider it a niche product and haven't trained their staff in answering questions related to it. > > It came with a very heavily customised version of 8.04. Frankly, I > didn't like it a lot, and am now running Lucid beta (Netbook edition) > and the whole thing is fantastic! How heavily customised? Does it come with non-standard software and drivers or is it just a case of having it heavily Dell branded? > > Also, the Mini 10v only has 8 Gig of hard drive. Why, Oh why do Dell > insist on including a 1.4 Gig recovery partition? I didn't spend long > looking, but never found a way of booting into it! And the manual only > tells how to use it from Windows!!! > > The supplied restore DVD gives no configuration options at all. If you > run it, it re-partitions the HD just as factory supplied. That's what they'd do with Windows so I suspect they never imagined that Linux users may want anything else. > > As you can imagine, my system now uses the whole drive. > > Complaints on the Dell forums are always about the amazingly slow speed > of the Mini V10. Mine runs at least as fast as my fairly up to date > Windows XP PC. The complaints usually come from Windows 7 users. > > Dell have a great little Netbook here. Why must they spoil it? > > Oh, the other thing is I wanted a fallback. I have a nice little Puppy > Linux installed on a 250 Meg card, and I've added partimage to it. It > really is a lovely way of getting back to a stable installation if any > of the regular upgrades goes sour on me. > > On a completely different point, someone here mentioned an exhibition > where there were some OU folk competing an old Windows machine against > Ubuntu .... A short while back, someone gave me two Pentium iii PC's > built for Windows 98. I was going to strip them down, but just for fun, > I tried U-Lite on them. They turned out to be VERY serviceable, and > better than they ever were on Win 98. It just goes to show ..... I just installed Xubuntu Lucid beta 2 on an old Pentium III (700MHz, 384MB RAM, 8.8GB HDD) and it absolutely flies. Windows 2000 that was running (or rather crawling) on it until last night would take 1/2 hour to boot and would be very painful to use. Xubuntu takes 1 minute and 30 seconds to go from "on" to fully logged in with Wi-Fi connected and makes it a very usable machine: great for web browsing, listening to music or using the occasional spreadsheet. Bruno -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
