Ubuntu

General Hardware Specifications of DELL XPS M1330:

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    Status under Linux
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    Notes
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  Works
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  No special procedure required during installation.
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  Works
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  Can be detective automatically during install.
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  Works
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  System will remind you to install restricted driver(automatically)
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  Works
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  No special procedure required during installation
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  Works
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  No special procedure required during installation
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  N/A
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  N/A
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  Works
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  No special procedure required during installation
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  N/A
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  N/A
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  Works
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  No special procedure required during installation
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  Works
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  Can search the available wireless signals automatically after installed
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  Works
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  No special procedure required during installation
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  Works
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  No special procedure required.
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  Support but didn&#8217;t test
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  I don&#8217;t know how to get connection with my cell phone.
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  Works (Only tested SD cards)
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  No special procedure required.
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This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.22

It’s a long time that I didn’t update my blog. The reason was I felt a bit tired. To write English everyday is not as easy as to write Chinese everyday. And I found the advantage of English writing was it can easily express the logic. That means, you can say something academic or argue some topic. That’s simple. But if you’d like to talk some feelings like in Chinese, that’s not that simple.

Yesterday was a fantastic day, because I could run Ubuntu on my laptop. I had heard about Linux when I was in primary school. I tried to get one and use it, but always couldn’t achieve it. Sometime my parents didn’t buy it for me(the Internet was not that strong in that days), or sometimes I didn’t have a computer for my own use(if I installed Linux, others couldn’t use the computer), or most of the time my laptop didn’t support Linux.

今天回到家后我看到了昨天收到的Ubuntu 7.04系列光盘的包裹，包括了2张Ubuntu 7.04桌面版光盘，1张Ubuntu 7.04 for 64-bit PC，1张KUbuntu 7.04桌面版，1张Edubuntu和4张Ubuntu宣传贴纸。包裹依旧是从荷兰寄来的。

感谢Solidot和Nicky，让我知道了Ubuntu光盘又可以通过“ShipIt”得到了。申请邮寄的地址没有变，依然是http://shipit.ubuntu.com。

昨天，在一台老机器上安装了Arch Linux 0.7，不过到了晚上又删除了。因为Arch确实有它的局限性。

对我来说，最大的问题就是软件包太少、太旧了。有很多我们在Unix桌面环境下常用的工具都没有二进制版本。本来安装好了Arch，开始准备配置X时，发现默认带的FVWM是2.4版的，这个版本对中文支持不好，我以前用的时候怎么都没法让窗口的标题栏显示中文。于是我又上网去找2.5版的。由于是台老机器，没有网卡，我搞了半天也没法用猫拨号，只好在另一台机器上把包下载下来，再用优盘拷贝过来安装。上Arch的官网一搜，2.5版的FVWM没有官方的安装包，需要下载自己编译安装。于是按照链接地址下载。等到拷贝到Arch这里来，却发现了一个问题，默认状态下无法解开bz2的包。于是赶紧下载那个gz包。编译、安装到也没出什么问题。

随着我对Linux的试用与了解，我改变了对Linux的态度–我也许会在新计算机上安装Linux而非FreeBSD。主要原因是FreeBSD不支持我的iPod，这样白白浪费了一个移动硬盘，且用FreeBSD作为桌面工作站确实有一定的麻烦，同时我又找到了合适我的Linux发行，因此会有这种想法。

今天把昨天收到的Ubuntu Live CD试用了一下，让我十分无奈。似乎Linux再非昨日那倡导KISS的UNIX替代品了。

用光盘引导机器，等了半天，我始终没能启动X环境。仔细看看包装上的文字才发现它要求256M以上的内存，而我的机器只有128M。我心目中的UNIX不该如此占内存的。不过，这也不能算Ubuntu的错。这年头，哪台电脑上没个256M内存呢？