UBUNTU is making it on my next format!!!

Well, I'm at about the 6 month point since my last format and windows is getting a little messy so I have to start thinking reformat. This time I think Ubuntu is going to make it as my primary partition. I'm thinking 40gb-ubuntu partition, 20gb windowsxp partition. Sadly I have to keep XP because of some scanning software that I'm not sure I can emulate in wine.

Here's the hardware I need working:
WiFi drivers (gigabyte)
Bluetooth
Bluetooth DialUp Networking (via my treo 650)
ATI video drivers @ 1680x1050 w/3d acceleration

Those are the only devices I'm worried about. I have Ubuntu installed on my desktop machine and have it working flawlessly (3d drivers perfect, dvd playback perfect, sound drivers perfect, etc). It took me a while to fix many issues, but I eventually got them all sorted out.

In the end I think I'm mostly worried about the ATI video drivers. My desktop machine is a geforce 6800gt, so getting the drivers installed took less than 5min. Instructions for installing the ati drivers span nearly a dozen pages, require custom kernals, etc.

So my question is, does anyone have ubuntu installed on a sager 4750 or any laptop based on the d47k chassis? If so, can you share any trials and tribulations on getting ubuntu to work perfectly?

I guess I'm the first 4750 user to install ubuntu!!

Anyway, the ati drivers were a piece of cake, although I didn't install the recently released ones from ati. I got 1680x1050 res with GL working perfectly.

dual windows/ubuntu boot works, Wifi works, treo650 syncs with evolution perfectly, bluetooth mouse works perfectly, networking works perfectly, printer shares work, cd burning works, dvd playback is perfect, integrated webcam works, powernow seems to work fine...

Things that don't work:
-Bluetooth dial up networking (haven't tackled this one yet)
-sd card reader doesn't work (device comes up as unknown)
-haven't configured midi yet

All in all, I'm shocked at how easy it was to get everything working so well. I thought I'd go through driver hell. Once I get eclipse and java working I think i'll rarely use my windows partition. The only thing i'm gonna have to do is setup a windows vmware session to test my web application.

The only cavet I have is with linux fonts. Granted, they have come a long way, but they are still not as clean as windows fonts. It makes testing my html coding REALLY hard as the page is rendered completely different in a linux browser.

Next projects are getting Maya7 working and Ardour Working.

I also thought I's mention that i'm not running the 64bit ubuntu. I've tried it in the past and too many critical packages (like win32 codecs) were unsupported. I'll upgrade to 64bit after another release or two.

-BT

Thanks abf. It's actually:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

to get the ms fonts. Jeeze, I wish I knew this sooner, firefox looks virtually perfect now. Sadly, opera still has aliasing issues. I'm gonna have to look around to see if it's fixable because I use opera 90% of the time.

0BT

Well, jack doesn't like my onboard sound (what a suprise). Since it doesn't look like my firewire 410 is supported in linux I think I'll have to upgrade my external audio before I get any further in ardour.