I got a fancy new notebook.

Couldn't beat the price of $850 CAD, new, so I got it. I'm a sucker for a deal. So far it just looks pretty. It's a Compaq Presario 2100. Athlon Mobile XP 2400+ CPU (It's actually faster than anything else I have!) 512MB o' Ram, 40GB HD, a DVD/CD-RW, 15" LCD, networking, modem and a few other fine features including pretty blue LEDs, but not blnding bright blue, nice, soft blue.

I booted up with Windows XP Home that it came with, tried to use it, felt like I was gonna vomit, so I fetched my new favorite distro of Linux, Ubuntu Linux. It's based on my all-time favorite so usability is familar, only this one is more "bleeding edge." Since I documented my installation of Windows' Server 2003 a few weeks ago, I'll do this in the same fasion.

I downloaded the cd image, burned it, and chucked it in my cdrom.

8:36pm I rebooted, started the installation process. It asked me a few generic questions, about keyboard layout and language. Since I can't read foreign characters, I picked english and a US keyboard layout. Pretty easy. I named it 'beer' because I like beer. It asked me about partitioning, and since it's just a notebook and not a server I chose the default 'partition this whole damn thing'... It actually doesn't say damn, but you get the point.

8:54pm It's still copying stuff, and I'm observing that it's copying a lot of language packs. Since I only picked english, why is it doing this? Stuff I'm just going to remove, I guess. Ah well. At least I haven't had to reboot yet!

9:02pm It wants my timezone, ok. It's smart enough to only let me pick those from the place I said I was from. It asks for a username, I give it my standard issue name. Now it wants to install a bootloader (the thing that fires up the OS), so I did.

9:04pm I reboot. It ejects my CD.

9:05pm It's doing some final comfigurations now, making love to my cdrom. Now it wants me to give it a place to get internet updates from. It's got a nice, big, list. So I pick the US site because it's usually fast and it's updating.

9:08pm It's downloading 53MB of updates - this may seem like a lot, but if I have to point out that if I were to maintain my Windows XP, or reinstall the version I was given, I'd need to get Service Pack 2, which is 230MB, plus following updates from Microsoft.

9:12pm It's done downloading, now it's ripping through the configuration and setup of those program components...

9:25pm It's done. I reboot... no, just kidding. No rebooting. The GUI is alive, I login, click some stuff, and well golly-gee-willickers! It appears to work.

Right out of the proverbial box, my system is up and running. Sound works, Power managment appears to be working (I'm going on the basis of the 'plug' icon and the fact that it says my battery is at 100%, which it was before I started). Networking works, if it didn't my installation would've been screwed. The default video resolution is set to the native resolution of my screen. The "CPU Frequency Monitor" works -- this is to monitor the speed of my computer since it's a Mobile CPU, it varies by workload. Office applications are all there. Internet apps, instant messangers, web browser, email, weeee. It all seems so nice!

The touchpad works, the little 'slider' on it works. The toggle button works.

CDs inserted automagically mount (show up on the desktop). This silly little no-name "Pine" USB Flash Drive that I got with my notebook for free also automagically mounts. It's a wonderful thing.

Some of the function (Fn) keys don't work, like brightness, hybernate, stand by, etc. But I've managed to assign some of them, volume and email keys for example to actual features. I'm sure the rest of the very very few quirks are easily solved by hitting google.

It still takes a while to install, but when you look at the amount of stuff it throws on there - an entire office suite, web browser(s), email clients, instant messangers, audio programs. Basically everything you need. Everything an ordinary user could want. It's come a long long way baby. That install was smooth.

... I wonder how Mike's Fedora install is going...