Posted from a native install of Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fawn on my new 160 GB drive. I’ve left room to copy over the contents of the old drive (e.g., Windows), but I think Ubuntu’s going to become my primary OS.

I still have lots of work to do, but here are some starting thoughts:

• The install is ludicrously easy. I ‘had’ to do the partitions by hand, but maybe that’s because it was a virgin unformatted hard drive…
• It named the computer n1zyy-laptop, which I accepted without thinking much of it at the time. As it was beginning to install, it occurred to me that I’d never indicated that it was a laptop. It’s not surprising that it’s able to detect it’s running on a laptop, but it is surprising that it’s so well-integrated that it can use that information in places like setting a hostname. It’s the little things that count, IMHO, and I give them a lot of credit for this one.
• Less than an hour ago, I had just installed the hard drive and inserted the Ubuntu CD. I’m now posting from a complete install, over wireless, having installed some third-party updates by hand and letting Ubuntu download 99 software updates. (They’re all installed, BTW.)
• It took me a while to get wireless working, but it was mostly my fault.
  • It automatically detected my network card, and warned me that the only drivers available were proprietary ones, and that they couldn’t make any guarantees about their quality.
  • I clicked on “Network” and it was set for “Roaming mode,” which I unchecked. It looked like I had to manually input all my information, but it turns out that it showed a drop-down box and I was just oblivious to it. I gave it my WEP key and… Nothing.
  • DHCP doesn’t work. I don’t get it. It works fine on other computers, but it’s not like we have some unusual DHCP setup going on. I just used a manual configuration and all was well. It somehow got the DNS servers from our DHCP server anyway, but not an IP.
  • The default mouse speed is really, really fast. At least coming from Windows.