As I have mentioned on the show, here is the review of my new laptop. I am actually running Debian lenny/sid on it and I have moved the whole production environment over to it so everything should be much more reliable now. I love this machine! What a wonderful Linux laptop… But now, without further ado, on to the review:

It has been nearly four weeks now since my brand new Dell XPS m1330 laptop arrived over here and I have now had enough time with it to give a detailed review of my experiences, including installing and running Linux Mint 4.0 on it. In a nutshell, I am very impressed. this is the most Linux compatible laptop I have seen to date. I can wholeheartedly recommend buying it — if you are patient and keep an eye on the Dell website like I did, you might even get a pretty good deal on them (I managed to score €250 off in addition to free shipping). I had to specifically request them to deliver the laptop without Windows via email but in the time since, they started selling it with Ubuntu preinstalled which is great and also explains why the platform is so amazingly Linux compatible.But lets start at the beginning. First of all, here’s the specifications of the machine (which in basically all cases is pretty maxed out as it is):

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T7500, 2.20GHz
• Memory: 4GB Dual Channel 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• Display: 13.3″ WXGA White-LED Display (with TrueLife)
• Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 8400M GS with 256MB VRAM
• Storage: 320GB SATA drive (@5400rpm)
• Optical: 8x DVD+/-RW slot-load drive
• Networking: Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N, Bluetooth
• Ports: Ethernet, 2x USB2.0, Firewire, HDMI, VGA, SD card reader
• Extras: Fingerprint reader, media buttons, remote control, webcam

As for the case design, it completely blows me away. The screen is mindbogglingly thin and really bright and the combination of brushed aluminium and rubberised plastic make this little laptop a real eye turner. As you can see in the corresponding photo gallery, I choose the red one which looks really slick. The barrel hinges on the screen look and work great and make a very sturdy impression as well. Despite the MacBook Air, this is still one of the thinnest notebooks on the market and it’s also pretty light. In fact, this is a real MacBook-killer in my opinion — compared to the Air, the construction seems very solid and as an added bonus it comes with an optical drive and an Ethernet port as well.

I waited for some time for Dell to offer some nice special deals — which they did shortly after Christmas — and snapped it up. I configured it through their web interface and when I got the order confirmation, I wrote them an email asking if they could keep Windows and the other apps off the machine. They were very nice about it and refunded me the money for Vista, Works and the Symantec crap and when the system arrived, there was no OS on it at all. I formatted the drive and installed Ubuntu Studio on it which even after about two hours of hacking would still refuse to recognise the sound card, at which point I got fed up with it (a multimedia distro without sound doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid) and moved on to Linux Mint. That installed in about 15 minutes after which I imported my home folder from a backup and reinstalled all my applications with AptOnCD.

As I have mentioned in the beginning of this review, I am really amazed at how well the hardware is supported in Linux which in the light of Dell’s recent move to sell it preinstalled with Ubuntu doesn’t seem like a coincidence. The wifi card connected as soon as I entered my WPA key and even works with the Gnome Network Manager, which has caused me a lot of grief in the past — so far it hasn’t dropped out a single time. The same goes for the Bluetooth module: it works flawlessly with the Gnome management utility. The install of the binary Nvidia drivers via the restricted drivers manager was also a breeze; basically three clicks and a reboot. After that I could use CompizFusion with all effects cranked up the wazoo and also play World of Warcraft, Civilization IV and Command & Conquer 3 trough Wine as well as the native Linux clients of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and EVE Online. For a laptop, this machine is quite a nice gaming rig (only the didicated VRAM is a bit on the low side). As for peripherals, the trackpad features and all the media buttons — which are amazingly cool looking touch surfaces that light up blue when you activate them — worked out of the box and even the little remote control which retracts into the ExpressCard slot does everything it should exactly as you expect it to. The SD card reader and the build-in web cam also worked out of the box and I was immediately able to transfer photos from my Nikon D50 and use the video call feature in the Skype 2.0 beta. The only component that you have to set up manually is the biometric fingerprint reader (which I haven’t done yet, but according to this blog post isn’t too hard). The sound card is very well supported in Mint, just the internal microphone doesn’t work (there’s apparently a kernel patch to fix this, but I won’t bother with it since these internal mics always have horrible quality anyway and I was never planning on using it for exactly that reason).

The only slightly negative point about this whole purchase was the fact that Dell apparently left a hidden partition for MediaDirect on the hard drive which in Windows is needed for that feature to work, but messes up GRUB when you have it installed and press the little “house” button (which is conveniently located next to the power switch and turns it into some kind of self-destruct button on Linux systems). According to a thread on the Ubuntu forums that process isn’t irreversible but still a bloody annoying caveat. This discovery lead me to back up my data and applications and completely zero my drive with the dd command which is, as I was told, the only way to get rid of the hidden partition. I let this running over night and reinstalled Mint in the morning (luckily, Linux installs much faster than most other operating systems). I must also stress that AptOnCD proved invaluable here once again. The ability to completely back up and restore all applications you ever installed on your system in a matter of minutes is priceless. This power is the reason why I absolutely prefer distributions that use apt over all others. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle had I known about the hidden partition before I first installed the OS, though. I can only assume the presence of that partition on my system was a mix up on somebody’s part at Dell — I don’t hold a grudge about it though, in the grand scheme of things it was only a minor hiccup compared to how satisfied I am with this purchase as a whole. My mate Dan, who ordered the same laptop and asked Dell to install Linux on it for him didn’t have the MediaDirect thing on his drive and his machine boots straight into GRUB when said button is pressed (as mine also does now, after the wipe).

All in all, I am completely in love with this machine. As I said, it wasn’t cheap (especially in this configuration; although you can get some good deals on the basic models — especially with the new Ubuntu offerings) but it is one of the best mobile computers out there right now in my opinion. Who said you need to buy a Mac to get a fast, sexy looking system? And lets face it, I rather have the freedom of choice that Linux gives me… Bottom line: The perfect laptop to run Linux on. Mint 4.0 on this machine easily rivals the ease of use of Windows or Mac OS X — in the case of Vista I would even say it exceeds it. Again, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for a desktop replacement or simply a sleek mobile alternative, especially for using Linux on the road.

Hey folks, my first blog post here. I thought it was time I posted something so here it is

As you will know by now the new version of Ubuntu is due out in the next week, that big banner on the sidebar may have given it away. So I plan to spend the next week trying out a new Linux distribution each day to see how I get on before eventually moving to Ubuntu 7.10. I’ve tried a few different distributions in the past but since moving to Ubuntu about a year ago, I have be honest, I haven’t tried much else, certainly not outside of VMware. I guess I got comfortable and just didn’t bother. Since I will be upgrading my system to the new Ubuntu anyway, now seems like a good time to take a little tour of the Linux world and see what’s happening. I can’t promise it will be comprehensive with so many distributions out there though, I can’t try them all in a week so I’ve made a hit list of the major ones I want to try out:

PCLinuxOS 2007 - Never tried this but heard about it quite a lot.

OpenSuSE 10.3 - As much as I hate the Microsoft/Novell deal I have used SuSE in the past and it was my first ever Linux distribution so I owe it another chance.

Mandriva 2008 - Another distribution that has been an old friend to me, the new 2008 version is fresh out this week so I figured I’d try it.

Slackware 12 - I’ve never used Slackware but it has a strong following and has been around a long time. Can’t wait to see what it’s like.

Fedora 7 - This disc has been sat on my desk for ages, I’ve used Fedora and Red Hat many times in the past, the last version I used was Fedora 5 so it’s been a while.

Debian Etch - Lastly I will try out Debian, the distribution which has spawned so many others including Ubuntu of course. I’ve used it on the odd server but never on my desktop, it has a reputation as the purists OS, awkward to use but powerful. We’ll see.

So that’s about it, I missed a few obvious ones I know. Gentoo is not in there basically because I’m not a sadist and I don’t want to compile everything. I have used Sabayon before which is supposed to be the easy to use version of Gentoo but I didn’t bother with it in this experiment as I figured I have enough on my plate.

So that’s it, I’ve backed up my /home partition with rsync and I’m almost ready to go, just got some md5 sums to check and some discs to burn and then I’m off. Wish me luck, I will report back… I hope