Ubuntu from Dell “Day 2″ impressions

As mentioned earlier, Meg’s new computer is a Dell with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. Overall, we’re still happy with the system, but I wanted to mention a few “gotchas” i’ve found since being able to poke around the system a bit more.

First, Meg’s system came with a widescreen monitor. X windows was only configured with one 16:9 resolution choice, so if Meg want’s to reduce the resolution, everything is stretched out. I know if this is a fairly simple xorg.conf fix, and Meg’s gotten used to the 1680×1050 resolution, so it hasn’t been a big deal.

Secondly, in an effort to conserve power, I enabled power management so the system would suspend after after an hour of activity. Most of the time, this works. Every few times, it doesn’t recover correctly and needs to be shutdown before coming back up. Other times, the network connection is unable to get a DHCP lease. I’ve turned this off to stop irritating Meg until I can get it to work more consistently.

Meg is busy taking grad classes and her only complaint about OpenOffice.org is the lack “WordArt” as seen in Microsoft Word. I’ll have to see if the Format > FontWork option does the trick for her.

Overall, I’m still very impressed. The screen resolution is a minor nit-pick, and I’m not even sure if that level of polish exists on the windows side of the world. Suspend or hibernate don’t work correctly on my own (older) system, so that fact that it works most of the time is still a good sign.

Posted in Gadgets, Geek Stuff, Linux