The venerable Dell XPS m1210 that had the privilege of so many of the Hatter's blogposts having been authored on it has given up the ghost, after five years of noble service. The laptop is dead, long live the laptop!
In comes the new Samsung RV520, rather under-powered on the CPU front, but well endowed in RAM and in claimed battery life - all of six hours is claimed - at a price that comes in under that of the Hatter's latest smartphone, and delivered in the proverbial blink of an eye by Flipkart. The times, they are a-changing!
Dual-boot of Windows 7 Home Basic and Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneric Ocelot) was promptly set up, and we are glad to report that things run (mostly) like a charm. None of those pesky hibernate issues that plagued the Dell, we are glad to state.
One irritant that was solved was the brightness hotkey not working, and the "dim screen to save power" option actually doing something entirely different. Those were resolved by simply adding "acpi_backlight=vendor" to the kernel parameters in /etc/default/grub.
Ubuntu Oneric is rather easy to use, and the hang of the new "Unity" interface has already been got.
(This would be a good time, if the gentle reader so wished, to remind the Hatter that that is the sort of gratuitous use of the passive, up with which he will not put. )
Actual battery life in real-life use is well over three hours, but well under the claimed six. Now to optimize that a bit ...
A techie's life is never boring.
In comes the new Samsung RV520, rather under-powered on the CPU front, but well endowed in RAM and in claimed battery life - all of six hours is claimed - at a price that comes in under that of the Hatter's latest smartphone, and delivered in the proverbial blink of an eye by Flipkart. The times, they are a-changing!
Dual-boot of Windows 7 Home Basic and Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneric Ocelot) was promptly set up, and we are glad to report that things run (mostly) like a charm. None of those pesky hibernate issues that plagued the Dell, we are glad to state.
One irritant that was solved was the brightness hotkey not working, and the "dim screen to save power" option actually doing something entirely different. Those were resolved by simply adding "acpi_backlight=vendor" to the kernel parameters in /etc/default/grub.
Ubuntu Oneric is rather easy to use, and the hang of the new "Unity" interface has already been got.
(This would be a good time, if the gentle reader so wished, to remind the Hatter that that is the sort of gratuitous use of the passive, up with which he will not put. )
Actual battery life in real-life use is well over three hours, but well under the claimed six. Now to optimize that a bit ...
A techie's life is never boring.
2 comments:
Ubuntu, I'd love to load it but have been afraid. How straightward is it?
Quite straightforward.
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
You can put it on a USB stick and boot from it so that you can try it out without changing anything on your hard drive. Give it a shot.
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