Today I received my new Laptop. In the past I’ve used two already and was never very happy about them. The last couple of years I’ve done without them and that was fine.

Now I’ve decided to get one. I had a couple of things that made the selection easy: It just had to be an HP, as that is the company default more or less. I did not want to see myself constantly in the screen (they call it Bright View) and I want an Intel Video Chipset. Just to support them in their great Open Source work.

So it became a HP 6710b. It comes with wifi and bluetooth, has a 15 inch screen which can do 1650×1024, great. I really wanted a 12 inch screen, but they are so expensive….

Anyhow, I decided to buy a default one (instead of placing a build to order one), so it came with Windows Vista. Almost the first thing it did was popup a windows that run32dll crashed and if I wanted to report that. Sure. If that helps you. Anyhow, it was my first real Vista experience and I’m not so happy. Here we are, a brand new laptop, not the cheapest one and still it behaves really slow. Clicking an application, waiting, waiting, approving that that app is allowed to run (hey, can’t you detect it was me who clicked it), waiting, and it pops up. It’s slow, slow, slow. The graphics are great to watch and it looks like they made the release very nice. The bar on the side, the way windows popin and popout. But to be honoust, it is to slow to enjoy it really. But it works just enough to help our customers in the future.

So I used Windows to burn the needed cd’s for Feisty. First up was the alternative cd of Feisty. Problem there is that I did not see a way to resize the current partitions. Remembering that the Desktop cd could cope with that, I tried that one. Instead of X I got a busybox prompt. gr.. Ok so time to go to Gutsy – Tribe 2. Again a busybox. Ok. Time for the famous rescuecd from SystemRescueCd. I’ve used ntfsresize to resize that partition, then deleted the partition and made a new partition with the new NTFS size. Pretty scary stuff. Still not sure if I will be able to boot into Vista ever.

Now I’m watching the oem-installer of Feisty installing my system. And that is an underrated tool! What it does is that it creates an ‘oem’ user which you can use to install the system, make sure all drivers are there and that everything is complete. When you are done, you finalize the installation with a command on the commandline, which removes the oem user. Next time you boot the laptop, all questions about name, location, prefered keyboard layout and timezone are asked in a fancy screen. Perfect to ship it to the end user. Next time you install Kubuntu try it. It is on the alternate cd you can download and the installer for oem is one of the boot options. It really separates the boring ‘installation’ part from the ‘now-i’m-going-to-use-it’-part.

Plan is to compile kde4 asap (though not today ;-)) and start using KDE4 on that laptop full time. That should be a fun excersise. Seeing all plasmoids as they develop. I’m also curious if I can get everything to work. Especially the fingerprint thingie. I’ll blog about that later.