Well my Acer 9400 broke one of it's hinges due to extreme force of the spring in the laptop cover. Time for a new machine. The old aspire 9400 was a seventeen inch machine and functioned perfectly with Gutsy and the latest Hardy Heron 8.04 Kubuntu release. Wireless OK, everything ok. Mind you this was a pretty simple machine. Nothing like the HP Pavillion dv 9790 with fingerprint scanner, 2 250Gb hardisks, 4 Gb RAM, Built-in webcam, tv card, card scanner.

This machine has a very nice look. The cover has some kind of fancy tattoo style. Everything has a solid feel. The only thing I do not like so far is the keyboard, but that is probably something you have to get used to. There are some very fancy control buttons with blue lights. It has almost got that sturdy feel of an alienware machine. All buttons function out of the box. Bluetooth aussi!

I installed Hardy 64bit from DVD. My initial attempts with the cd failed miserably ending up in a black screen. Since I have such a powerful machine I also wanted the 64bit version of Hardy. I don't know if that was a good decision. 64bit is not lightning fast to me and apps like Opera and the new Lightning 0.8 for Thunderbird will not install due to them being 32bit. OK I have some challenges laying ahead. The webcam chipset is not supported by uvcvideo yet. So no image with Skype yet. del.icio.us/benvantende/05ca:1812

Uhh more about HP on Kubuntu can be found @ aldeby.org/blog/

....and I will report more on my experiences with my HP and Kubuntu ;-)