Bye, Bye, MacBook
After my MacBook broke, I was faced with finding something to replace it with. I was kind of getting tired of the slowness, cost, and hassles of OS X anyway, and spending two hours trying to get H.323 video conferencing to work on the Mac today and then having Ekiga on Linux “just work” made the decision easy.
For $800, I could get an HP DV2415US, a 14″ 1G/160G Core2 Duo laptop. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation was straightforward and required almost nothing special. Wireless, suspend, the built-in video and microphone, graphics, and graphics acceleration all worked out of the box (it’s all Intel peripherals).
Only audio output required a small change, adding the following line to “/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base” (I found this on Google):
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=3stack
Vista on this laptop was sluggish and hard to use. Ubuntu is a joy. Even Beryl works, and works very well.
