I’ve played for two days with my laptop and it’s nicely getting into shape. Of course my Vista partition was corrupt, so I could not boot into it. So I reinstalled it with a non-hp version. And to my big surprise, it is super fast again. So all slowness I blogged about originally is now gone. Amazing how a ‘distribution’ can destroy a good working operating system. Even on Windows.

So the kubuntu installation was almost smooth. The Feisty version did not boot into X, complaining about to little VideoRAM, manually adding it into xorg did not help, then I found out it is a bug in the kernel. So I took my chances and upgraded to Kubuntu Gutsy. The .22 kernel worked, and showed me kdm on 1650×1050 with the intel driver. The text is still a bit blurry and not so sharp and crisp, but I hope that can be improved by some setting somewhere.

Wifi works out of the box, and bluetooth as well, although i did not test it. Hibernate and Suspend work also out of the box, although I have to tap the fn+brighter key to get picture again after resuming. The ‘touchscreen’ controls at the top to activate wifi/bluetooth and volume control also work. The only thing not working is the fingerprint reader. It is a different chipset, currently not working with thinkfinger.

I’ve compiled KDE4 in no-time and now tweaking the things to get a good developer setup. It is so much nicer when things compile quickly.

Update: The blurry is a defect in the driver so it seems. Following the documentation from here solves the issue. Now the screen is awesome. This is the reason why I wanted open source drivers for my screen.