Congratulations

[Greg Taylor]

Greetings,

	I just thought I'd take a moment to congratulate the Ubuntu Laptop
Testing Team for really picking up the ball and running with it for this
release. We were faced with some really steep challenges coming into
Dapper, and since the first week we've fixed countless bugs, solved a
staggering amount of problems, and have increased laptop compatibility
by a great degree.

	I don't generally go on random tangents like this, but it has really
became evident how Ubuntu on laptops has progressed at the last few
Installfests my Linux User Group has held. I remember just last year
having to use ndiswrapper for wireless, mess with ACPI flags just to get
the installer to come up, and generally kludge through quite a few
quick-n-dirty hacks to get other things like hot keys working (if at all
even possible at the time). Fast forward today and we suddenly find the
LUG members having to help the new users less and less with their
installations. Things are "just working", the myth that Linux is only
installable with those possessing mystical tech prowess is being
dispelled, and we are finally seeing people start to really pick up and
use the product of our hard work.

	A great illustration is this Tecra I've been tasked with working on
from Canonical. When I got this thing in the mail and sat down to try my
first install, I was saddened to not even make it to the partitioner.
ACPI errors, the drives weren't being recognized, my hard wired ethernet
interface had no driver, Xorg didn't play nice with my strange ATI
mobility card, wireless was shaky at best. I am now able to run the
installer with the defaults and be greeted with a working system in
under an hour.

	In any case, this email is way too long now, but good work guys. We've
come a long way and it's exciting to see the progress.