Currently myself and my laptop are on opposite sides of the planet—not a desirable situation for any geek. I do however have access to an early Centrino laptop, an Ubuntu 8.04 DVD, and a 4GB flash drive. Needing some nix time, and not wanting to alter the state of a hard drive that wasn't mine, I completed a full install of Ubuntu to the flash drive.

This was a full install following a tutorial found here on pendrivelinux.com. The only step in the installation that varies from the expected is that you need to check that the bootloader is indeed installed to the flash drive by clicking "advanced" on the penultimate screen.

Manufacturers of modern flash drives assure us that due to "wear levelling" that such a drive should last many years in this situation—your mileage may vary. The performance of my generic flash drive is not as good as that of a hard drive, but is acceptable once the computer has booted. From memory, there was about 1.2 GB of space left after install. The Ubuntu installer chooses an appropriate amount of swap memory based on the available drive space. Even though this computer has 1 GB of memory installed, cat /proc/meminfo shows that the swap space is 224868 kB, much smaller than the usual "dumb" setting of "double the RAM".

There was one bug however. After installation the login screen would appear, but after logging in, I would be greeted by a blank screen. I followed a workaround posted here on bugs.launchpad.net. Firstly you have to login on an alternate terminal (Ctrl+Atl+F1) and remove the X11 lock by sudo rm /tmp/.X0-lock. And then issue the command startx and configure GDM for autologin by opening "Login Window" within "Administration". I did so and now all is well.

Ubuntu is beginning to impress me. I'm really liking it!

Just a week or so after I installed 7.10, 8.04 was released. Just the one wee problem when upgrading...

After upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04 3D performance plummeted to 5% of the previous glxgears score, falling from about 2000 fps to about 100 fps. Previously in 7.10 I had installed xserver-xgl to get the 3D to work. Now removing that...

...the glxgears score gains back ground to 1200 fps. Still not as much as before but much better than 100 fps (and ppracer now runs again).

It's happened! I'm a convert! Ubuntu is now my linux of choice! What follows are my personal notes for installing 7.10 onto a HP nx6125 laptop (this is not intended to be a "How to"). There are a few issues that really, really, really should be attended to by anyone installing this OS on this laptop—especially configuring usplash.conf to speed up boot time. Notes specific to the nx6125 are noted as such.

3D Acceleration & Desktop Effects (nx6125)

Enable the repositories:
System --> Administration --> Software Sources
...and ensure that at least the first 4 check-boxes are selected under the "Ubuntu Software" tab.

Install restricted drivers by appeasing that pop-up in the system tray, or if you've dismissed it already go to:
System --> Administration --> Restricted Drivers Manager
...and select "ATI accelerated graphics driver"

Change last bit in xorg.conf ("Composite") from "0" to "1":

Then issue the terminal commands:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl
sudo aptitude install compizconfig-settings-manager

Go to "Add/Remove..." and search for "ms fonts". When the search is finished "Microsoft Core Fonts" should be at the top of the list. Installing this package improves the rendering of web pages.

Splash-screens & Boot-time (nx6125)

Startup is really slow and the splash-screen is missing. Also there is gibberish on screen at shutdown instead of the splash-screen. Fix this by issuing the following command:

And change the resolution to 1024 by 768.
And then the command:

...which can take a few moments.

Grub's config file has a different name to what I'm used to. It's edited by issuing the command:

 - I don't like the spacer "Other Operating Systems" which causes grub to crash if selected so I deleted it.
 - I reduced the timeout from 10 to 5
 - I added the following line to enable my custom background (Ubuntu has none):

Ubuntu has a giant command prompt. I removed \w and the semicolon from the file .bashrc in my home directory:

# PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u
@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u
@\h\[\033[00m\]\[\033[00m\]\$ '

...and...

# PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h\$ '

Gnome is the only GUI under which I like to use desktop icons, Ubuntu switches these off. At the terminal launch gconf-editor and then go to...
apps --> nautilus --> desktop
...and check the items you'd like to see on the desktop.

System --> Administration --> Synaptics Package Manager
Search for, and install, "mozplugger".

There is a wee bug that requires you to delete a file if present:

The file may regenerate in a healed state.

Screen Brightness (nx6125)

An unwanted side effect of the fglrx driver is that the screen brightness isn't easy to control. If you have an old BIOS, which you probably shouldn't have, screen brightness may be changed by using ctrl-alt-fn-f9 or f10. Otherwise to change brightness you have to firstly switch to a text console by pressing ctrl-alt-f6, press fn-f9 or f10 to adjust the brightness, and then press ctrl-alt-f7 to return you to X.

CPU Fan (nx6125)

The CPU fan never switches off in the first half hour or so of the computer being on, after which the CPU fan begins to behave as expected. The speed of the fan in this half hour is very low. Apparently the kernel switch acpi -t fixes the problem, allowing ACPI to only begin when the CPU temperature reaches 60 degrees C. I haven't tried this yet, I'm hoping it's fixed in a future kernel.

Go to "Add/Remove..." and search for, and install:
flash plugin
...and whatever else you can think of. Typically plugins installed via "Add/Remove..." behave better than those installed via Firefox itself, although the latter situation is always improving.

When IE7 detects that you are entering a password into a web-form, it asks you if you would like this password to be “remembered” for next time. If you choose “Yes”, well and good. If you choose “No”, it will never ask you again—a problem if you later change your mind. Well, recently, I changed my mind.

I followed the instructions given here on watchingthenet.com. Upon revisiting the page in question and entering my password, IE7 once again asked me if I'd like the password to be "remembered". Yay!