[Ubuntu-SG] Installation of Ubuntu Jaunty on the Acer TravelMate 5720

[spaiduhz at gmail.com]

Got this laptop for school purposes. Quite satisfied with the build quality,
but I ended up hating windows vista, especially after the service pack. Which
was why I reformatted my computer and installed windows XP professional.
Which was a slight headache, actually.

Installing Ubuntu 9.04 was much easier, actually. I tried Ubuntu Hardy on
wubi and upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid via update manager. Feeling rather
satisfied with the speed of Ubuntu, I decided to make a proper installation
of ubuntu jaunty in its own partition.

Wubi install and the proper install is very much different. In wubi, you
start with the windows boot loader, whereby you have to select linux, before
you go into the grub bootloader. annoying. In the proper install, you jump
straight into the grub loader, get a few seconds change to windows before you
proceed. often i want to load windows, and when i get distracted, ubuntu is
already done loading. fast or what? maybe even too fast, heh heh.

installing ubuntu was a little confusing when it comes to resizing
partitions. I had trouble resizing partitions when i loaded the demo. I had
no problems when i boot to cd and did everything from there though. Created
two ext3 partitions, and a 7.8GB swapfile partition, and installed ubuntu.
NO PROBLEM!

when ubuntu starts for the first time, wireless, bluetooth and audio works
out of the box. outstanding. the Suyin Acer Crystal Eye webcam requires some
effort to start, and installing the restricted ATI drivers was a few clicks
away. I didnt have a chance to test out the dialup modem, but from what i've
read, as of yet, ubuntu doesnt have drivers for the dialup modem. exclusion
of dialup in the connection manager seems to confirm this.

On the plus side, using the nokia e71 as a 3g modem works out of the box,
with the manager helpfully setting itself up to work with singtel
broadband-on-mobile. :) On the down side, I had trouble getting wammu to
detect the e71. :(

Windows XP is starting to take 10 minutes to get from coldboot, to ready (hdd
activity off) at this point, so i installed wine. Didnt like it too much, so
I installed virtualbox ose and installed windows xp on it. no problems!

Will talk more when i explore in further detail.