Who has a Dellbuntu?

[Ozor Mox]

I wanted to buy a new laptop to replace my broken one. I would have been happy to get something with Windows on it and then replace it with Ubuntu, but it just so happened that Dell sold a laptop (yes, one laptop) with Ubuntu pre-installed. It is mid-range and the right price, so I went for it.

It arrived yesterday, with Ubuntu 9.10 pre-installed. Of course, the first thing I will do is wipe that and put on 10.10, but I thought I'd boot up 9.10 to see what Dell installed Ubuntu looks like. It's pretty standard really. Asked me to enter a username and password for my account, with the laptop having been given the curious name of "dell-desktop".

Apart from a Dell recovery application and Ubuntu promotional video on the desktop, everything else looked like standard Karmic. I was a little surprised to find it needed Broadcom proprietary drivers, since I assumed it would be fitted with an Intel wireless card (as it uses the Intel i3 processor and Intel onboard graphics card), or some card with an open source driver, but that's fine.

Now here's the killer. I realised that desktop effects weren't enabled, so I opened the appearance menu and switched it to advanced visual effects. It asked me to keep the settings, I said yes. Then I clicked close and the whole thing hard locked. No mouse movement, clock froze, no Ctrl+Alt+F1-F7...

Rebooted ok back to GDM, but as I logged in it immediately froze again. After this happening several times, I did Ctrl+Alt+F1 and created a new user from the terminal. It logged in as them no problem. Tried the desktop effects again, and now that user is completely locked out too, as again it freezes on logging in.

Of course, I don't really care about any of this that much as I'm going to install 10.10 anyway, but I know this much... If I didn't know how to install an operating system, get to the terminal from the login screen, etc. and this was my first Ubuntu computer, I'd be mightily naffed off, as I'd now have to send it back to Dell saying the operating system is broken already.

Anyone got any experiences of the Dellbuntu computers? Did you stick with their install or did you do a fresh install straight away?

By the way, the laptop itself is very nice, I'm very happy with it so far.

[thatguruguy]

I have a Dell Latitude D820, but it had Windows on it when I got it.

[oldos2er]

I bought a desktop XPS 410 from Dell in 2007, it came preinstalled with 7.04. I've given it a few hardware upgrades since then, not to mention installing each new Ubuntu version as it was released.

IIRC, it came with a couple FAT* partitions with some type of DOS recovery files which really puzzled me at the time. Deleted them pretty quickly.

It seems a decent enough machine, but I won't be buying another Dell because I think in general they are overpriced. I could've built a more powerful machine myself with the same amount of money. I don't regret buying it though; at the time I had the money, and wanted to support Dell in selling preinstalled Ubuntu machines.

[aysiu]

I was a little surprised to find it needed Broadcom proprietary drivers, since I assumed it would be fitted with an Intel wireless card (as it uses the Intel i3 processor and Intel onboard graphics card), or some card with an open source driver, but that's fine.

I'm not surprised at all. This is the main reason people don't use Linux. The Linux preinstalled options are limited, and they're not really designed for Linux. "Linux preinstalled" just means "take parts of a computer designed for Windows and put Linux on there instead."

I bought an HP netbook with Ubuntu preinstalled, and it has a Broadcom 4312 card in it. Go figure.