notebook PC update

Your Compaq Presario v5000z notebook PC arrived on Tuesday, Feb 21st. It was supposed to ship by the 15th, but there was a manufacturing delay, which you were informed of on the 17th. So you did not expect the notebook to arrive on the 21st.

[Update] Here is why: today, Feb 24th, you received an email from HPshopping, informing you that the notebook has just shipped. Maybe this is HP Compaq's idea of a pleasant surprise.

Leaving this aside... The factory installation of WinXP Home SP2 was full of software you neither wanted nor needed, and trial offers for just about every major ISP you could think of. Not desiring any of those, you proceeded to wipe the HD and reinstall XP and Kubuntu Linux 5.10 from scratch. You have done this twice before on your desktop, so what's there to screw up, right?

Wrong. Both XP and Kubuntu 5.10 installed successfully, but in the case of the latter, you could not boot into KDE Display Manager, and thus could not log onto the GUI environment. After several hours trying to solve the problem from the command prompt, what few answers you gleamed from the Kubuntu forums told you that the problem lay in an incorrect X11 configuration for newer ATI (and Nvidia too, actually) GPUs. Wonderful. Beautiful. Great timing.

Next, you tried to install SUSE Linux 10.0 using their boot-CD-internet-install option. You barely get past the welcome screen. Hit "Enter" to choose to start the installation sequence, the kernel begins to load, then the system just hangs. One more distro down for the count.

Ironically you experienced no trouble booting from an older MEPIS Linux live CD though.

[latest update] Finally, you tried a different, experimental (literally) approach: Kubuntu 6.40 "Dapper" Alpha Release 4. Not even a beta release candidate, but an alpha release. Not meant for production purposes. Installation goes without a hitch. Sometimes it pays to live on the cutting edge.