buying a laptop either bare or with Ubuntu

[Alex Hewitt]

michael miller wrote:
> About 2 mo ago I needed to upgrade my wife's laptop computer.  I saw an
> Acer for just under $400 at Best Buy that looked interesting.  I'm not
> an Acer fan, but at that price for a 15.5" LCD laptop with an Intel dual
> core 2GHz T3200, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HD, DVD DL burner and wlan I thought it
> was worth a try.  I was assured that if I installed any operating system
> other than Vista, the warranty would be void.  I let it go through the
> the Vista install just to make sure it worked, then partitioned the HD
> and installed Ubuntu 8.04.  It's worked without a glitch so far and she
> loves it.  At some point I'll delete Vista, probably after the warranty
> runs out.
>
> Mike Miller
>
> On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 16:30 -0500, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 20:24 -0500, Nikkiana H. wrote:
>>     
>>> I bought both the Studio 15 and the Mini recently and am pretty happy
>>> with them.
>>>       
>> Well the Dell Studio 15 arrived yesterday.  When I tried to boot it, the
>> splash screens and text boot messages worked fine.  However, when it
>> came time to draw the desktop, the screen changed to a bright background
>> with colored pinstripes running vertically.  The bundled diagnostics
>> (from the boot menu) pass and an external monitor shows a normal Ubuntu
>> desktop.
>>
>> I tried the Dell on-line chat support and was given a number for Ubuntu
>> support.
>>
>> This turned out to be Canonical.  The person I spoke to said he had
>> heard that Dell switched LCD screens on the Studio 15 production line
>> without properly testing the new screens.  Ubuntu is not working with
>> those new LCD screens.
>>
>> He gave me the Dell Ubuntu support phone number.  When I called, they
>> said they have no fix.  I can replace my laptop as defective, but they
>> do not expect the replacement to work any better.
>>
>> My guess (as a software guy) as to what is going on:  Ubuntu is only
>> detecting 4:3 resolutions from the video controller and the LCD screen
>> only supports 16:9 (or 16:10) resolutions.  I fiddled the xorg.conf with
>> no success using an external monitor.  I could only get 4:3 resolutions
>> to show on the external monitor.  Attempts to force 1280x800 which is
>> the documented resolution for the LCD resulted in a 640x480 screen on
>> the external monitor.  None of these had any impact on the built-in LCD
>> screen.
>>
>> I'm returning the laptop to Dell and will buy something else.
>>
>>
>>     
>
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>   
One of the interesting things about Acer is that they sell most of the 
same models in the US with Windows but with Linux for other countries.  
I'm typing this on an Aspire 5100 that I bought a couple of years ago. I 
run Ubuntu 8.04 as my primary OS but switch back to Vista on another 
partition whenever I need something that is Windows specific. Installing 
Ubuntu on this machine was pretty easy and except for a few burps when 
upgrading it's been quite reliable.

-Alex