[CoLoCo] system76 Starling report

[Collins Richey]

Cross posting to both lists.

My Xmas present to myself is a Starling netbook from System76. I've
never been a great fan of laptops, but this one is light and portable
enough to suit my tastes. A few notes if you get one. I've always been
a fan of supporting local entrepeneurs, and System76 is top notch.

1. The Starling comes with netbook remix installed. This is not my
favorite, but it does work well including on wireless. Network Manager
has improved since I used it a few years back!

2. So, I decided to accept the offer to upgrade to 9.10 (on wireless).
Three hours later after no errors, I rebooted the system, and, of
course, wireless was dead.l

3. This is not a System76 problem. The good folks at Ubuntu released
9.10 without bothering? being able? to test with a Realtek rtl8187b
chip. Carl and company posted a warning about this, but of course I
didn't read it before upgrading. I'm not sure whether Ubuntu is doing
anything, but System76 is working on a fix. Meanwhile, a helpful user
reported a workaround using ndiswrapper that works for some users ( me
included).

4. So now everything is just ducky, well ... almost. I've never been
fond of Gnome, and I'm not impressed with the current offering. Gnome
ducks, or a rhyming word. Not that it doesn't work, I'm just not fond
of it.

5. Not being a long-time laptop user, I've got a lot of questions.
I'll start a new thread on CLUE, and those who are interested can
follow along.

You Ubuntu folks need to support System76.



-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.