Wonderful - It's like greased lightning :-)

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OK I've finally got Ubuntu 8.04 running on the Vista laptop and surfing the web with my puny dial up modem is MUCH MUCH faster. Pages appear pronto instead of all the delays with Vista. I'm megga happy

I haven't used Ubuntu in over a year, are you using wifi or a lan connection, I could only get lan to work with my compaq presario.

Neither. It's a standalone laptop. I've only got internet connectivity via a dial up modem. Here in rural France broadband or fast internet has yet to arrive, so it's still slow lane surfing. It's ok for people who live in towns or within a couple of kilometres of the telephone exchange, they can get ADSL2.

Vista has been giving me major grief since I got this laptop and it didn't matter if I surfed with Firefox or IE7 after a while the surfing got so slow pages were timing out and only a reboot fixed it. Using the same hardware now with Ubuntu the surfing speed seems to have doubled and is not slowing down over time.

I'll still use Vista for other stuff - I'm a software developer and unfortunately that is where the money is - writing stuff to run on Windows. Personally I'm trying to completely phase out Windows in favour of open source free software - I think that is where the future is.

Have you got your spinning desktop cube turned on yet, Tallyman?



(spudnik - I think there were several "breakthroughs" last year, in the wireless realms. It may worth another look. Example)

No? What is that? I'm an Ubuntu virgin. I installed version 7 on my other laptop a year ago but could not get the Winmodem to work so abandoned it. I'm still finding my way around Ubuntu.

there's been massive improvements in the last 6 months rather less the last year. if you want to check it out again...i'd say it's green light.

isn't that only with beryl? i don't think gnome has that...or if it does, i haven't found it yet.

it does have the jello and open/close window effects.

I'm impressed so far. The only downside I'd say is that if you have to start messing around configuring stuff it can get very complicated very quickly. Take for example my external dial up modem. Ubuntu doesn't recognise such devices so you have to download a program to identify the hardware then post the analysis results to a forum and some kind soul tells you what modem driver software you need. Mine turned out to need compiling (which wasn't difficult thankfully) but after installing it the phone line kept dropping after connection so it took an hour of trying different settings in the config file to get it to work. Not for the faint hearted. Anyway, it's up and running fine now and I'm pleased with the performance.

My only question now is - why is surfing with Vista so slow in comparison, using exactly the same hardware?

well windows has always sucked at memory allocation and distribution and use of the memory available. most likely it's just gotten that much worse due to the bloated nature of vista and the requirements simply just to run vista rather less run OTHER programs on vista effectively.

Is it systematic, hydromatic and ultramatic?

If not, then it can't be greased lightning

systematic - yes!

hydromatic - i haven't installed water cooling yet but possibly!

ulatramatic - the most!!

I might give it anouther try, I have the Compaq Presario V2570ca, that I just couldn't get working with 6.06 Dapper Drake
it worked great on my other 2 computers, and didn't have any hardware issues, I am downloading Ubuntu Studio as we speak

Beryl sort of died last year. They and the Compiz bunch finally decided to merge, and became Compiz-Fusion (roughly speaking).

In order to get full control over the compiz settings, install compizconfig-settings-manager to make things nice and easy.

You may need to check "Administration"/"Hardware drivers", to make sure your graphics driver is up to the task.

I also install compiz-fusion-plugins-main and compiz-fusion-plugins-extra for more fun. E.g. to paint fire on my screen.

I couldn't live without "Enhanced Zoom Desktop".

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Oh! And yippee! The "3D Windows" had gone missing. I just noticed it was properly back. Nice. Now my windows float up off the cube, so I can see them better. ("Cube Atlantis" seems to have disappeared - so no more 3D fish inside my cube - just the gear wheels - sob?)

got my copy Ubuntu Studio installed, had a little trouble getting on the internet though wifi, I am having trouble with the text size in firefox

I found it too small but Firefox has a neat feature that you can set the minimum text size. Very hand for those web pages that are too small to read.

Ubuntu Studio?

Whats that? And how cool is it?