When I decided to make the move to ubuntu on the desktop I also decided that I would change my laptop. The logic is that I’d rather only have one OS on the two “desktops” I use. It should make life easier and means less problems when jumping between them.

My lack of a USB cd-rom means that installing onto the laptop is an adventure into using PXE. This worked well when I installed FreeBSD and so I wasn’t overly worried about using it again. It took a little while to get the correct files in the correct place, but once I had done that it went quite smoothly. The reboot took place and there was Ubuntu – 4.10! My lack of familiarity with the Ubuntu names/versions meant I grabbed an out of date PXE tarball. Instead of worrying I decided to use it as a learning experience for upgrading the systems, which I did to 5.04 and then 5.10. It may have cost me some time but at least I learned some lessons along the way.

The system again feels slightly faster than FreeBSD and glxgears shows a 50% increase in speed. The two desktops are almost identical now – more so than they were under FreeBSD as more of the system is available on both.

It’s all been quite positive, with one exception – sound. I’ve spent a bit of today looking around the web, reading wikis (not something I normally participate in) and am still no further forward. I saw one blog post (I’ve forgotten the URL now) with a review of Ubuntu which summed up my feelings – “everything works out of the box except sound”. Some people seem to repot that they can get the level of operation that would be nice (having more than one application playing at once is the first thing) but despite trying a few of the descriptions it just doesn’t want to work here. Annoying and hopefully something that will get sorted out.