With my daily commute to St. Andrews by bus, I decided to purchase myself a cheep laptop to do small amounts of work on the move (always a good thing close to deadlines).
I decided to go for an Advent unit sporting a dual core processor and 1Gb RAM. Pre-loaded with Vista of course. So the first thing I do is attempt to install Ubuntu (dual boot).
Ubuntu doesn't even boot. Turns out I've got to disable ACPI support in the boot options. So no battery monitoring (though the machine is nice enough to beep and flash at you at low battery) and the system runs at full pelt all the time.
Not really major issues. The one thing I spent ages getting to work was wireless support. The machine uses a Realtek RTL8189 chip. Not supported by default (though will be in the next version of Ubuntu!) and requiring the download of a leaked and patched driver it was not what I would class as fun. Also, I couldn't just use the Windows drivers as they don't work with ndiswrapper.
Ah well, it's working on my home network just now (WEP for various reasons). The real test will be Eduroam (WPA2-Enterprise) with much mucking about with wpa_supplicant.
Though, while on the topic of Eduroam, I'm rather thankful that an access point has now been installed in the top floor of the union. Very useful when I'm there all week.
UPDATE:
I've managed to get rid of the crash on the "processor device is not present" message. Using nohz=off in the boot options allows the boot to continue and I get a battery meter!
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