Just Made The Switch - My story of joining the Ubuntu family

[Troy Davidson]

Well,

I am sold on Ubuntu.  Specifically, Kubuntu.  I have a Compaq Presario
2100 laptop.  Everyone says that putting Linux on this laptop isn't
the easiest because it doesn't support APM.  It needs ACPI.  And the
pcmci slot can be buggy.  I have had this laptop for over a year and
put Mandrake 10.0 on it.  I had to make a custom kernel and do some
tweaking to get my wifi card, D-Link DWL-G650, to work.  But, I did
it.

Well, I decided to upgrade to Mandrake LE2005 last weekend.  Again, I
had to make a custom kernel for the ACPI and the wifi to work.  And,
ACPI wass buggy and didn't work properly.  It wouldn't recognize when
the power cord was removed or plugged in.  And for some reason, my '
and ; keys didn't work very well.  I fought with LE2005 all week
trying to make it work right.

I had heard of Ubuntu before.  I heard it was an awesome distro.  I
looked into it and wasn't too excited about it since its main GUI was
Gnome.  But then I found Kubuntu.

I burned a disk yesterday and put it in the drive.  I booted up the
laptop and installed Kubuntu.  Everything went well.  It even found my
wireless card!

All right.  Everything is good so far.  I log in for the first time
and notice the KLaptop icon that is the front end for controlling
ACPI.  I have the laptop plugged into power so I unplug it and lo and
behold, the icon changes to a battery!  It picked up that I had
switched power sources!  LE2005 couldn't do that.  The fans also
weren't coming on.  That meant that the ACPI was working correctly!  I
was amazed.

But, my wifi card wouldn't connect.  I fiddled a bit with it, but it
still wouldn't go on.  This morning I was looking at a few config
files and came across /etc/network/interfaces.  I noticed all the
mentions for eth0 and lo.  No mention of ath0.  I edited the file and
copied all the entries that had eth0 and changed them to ath0. 
Rebooted the system and no my wifi card worked!  I was so excited!

Needless to say, Ubuntu has done what LE2005 couldn't.  I didn't need
to customize my kernel or anything.

I am still having problems with the learning curve and figuring out
how you do things in Ubuntu.  I am used to the MCC in Mandrake.

Anyway, I am sold.  I am very excited about Ubuntu and will be taking
my laptop into work tomorrow to so the other Linux advocates.
-- 
++++++++++++++++++
Troy Davidson