Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" on a Dell Inspiron 6000

From Julian Yap

UPDATE: My latest review for Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 6000 is Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" on a Dell Inspiron 6000.

I bought a Dell Inspiron 6000 around December 2005. Right now, I have a:

60 GB drive
DVD burner (dual-layer)
512Mb RAM
default Wifi b/g (centrino)
slightly faster than standard CPU (Pentium M 740 1.73Ghz, I believe)
set to dual-boot Windows and Linux.

My experience

Initially I installed Fedora because I'm most familiar with it. The install doesn't install the Wifi card which pissed me off because I didn't want to spend an hour or 2 (or more) setting it up. It doesn't make sense to me that I would need to do that on Fedora a community distribution on a centrino laptop. If it was the graphics card or something else, then I'd understand.

... Then I tried Ubuntu having used it before. Wifi worked on install, little things like the from multimedia buttons all work. Might I add, these don't even work on Windows install. I was uninstalling lots of pre-installed Windows Dell crap and then the buttons stopped working. They're controlled by some Dell program.

Function key combinations all work (volume, brightness, etc...). Would these have worked with Fedora? Don't care.

Laptop hibernation, suspend, stand by _all work. I know with Fedora this requires fiddling. I usually hibernate my machine at the end of the day. Maybe once or twice the Wifi hasn't resumed the next day but then a reboot fixed that. No real dramas.

Before settling with Ubuntu and the gnome desktop, I also tried out Kubuntu (KDE desktop). Multimedia keys didn't work. But mostly I prefer gnome. Mostly the feel of KDE with Konquerer I don't really like. Personal preference. I'm looking to re-evaluate when 6.04 comes out. I'll add that you can run all your favorite KDE apps like K3b (DVD/CD burner) perfectly fine on Ubuntu.

About the only thing that _doesn't work with Ubuntu is SD card slot. I've read this is because it's supplied by Ricoh who isn't giving any help to the Open Source community. Minor inconvenience to me because I have a digital camera which uses SD cards and it would be really handy to just pop in the card.

Minor issues like the Wifi/Network manager is shit, boot up could be faster, hibernate could be faster... All plan to be or have been addressed for version 6.04 (release in April) according to the roadmap.

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