I have a new computer!  A replacement for my laptop, which has been doing odd overheaty things and making bad noises for the last month or so.  Poor thing.  Still, not bad for being 3 years old and heavily (ab)used on a daily basis.

The new box is a desktop - a little teeny quiet one.  It's a Dell Inspiron Zino HD. In purple.  And even though obviously I know what spec it is, I can't be arsed to list it because I'm not a hardware geek, hah.

It came with Windows 7.  After two days, all I can really say about windows 7 is that the default dark grey background is dull and ugly... I used it long enough to burn some recovery disks

Kubuntu on the other hand, is still very lovely   I think every time I do a new install I'm even more impressed.  About a million times better than when I was first playing around with knoppix/debian six years ago!  And noticeably friendlier than the first few ubuntu installs I did too...

I shouldn't be surprised that things "just work" with linux now - and indeed, I'm not particularly.  Even wifi, which has been a headache on pretty much every machine I've had - all I had to do was let it install the proprietry driver.  No hacking about with ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant configs.  Lovely.  Not that I really plan on using wifi, but it's useful to have should I decide to move the computer/router.

The only problem I've found is that the rear line out doesn't work.  Quick google suggests this is a common one, and the "fix" is just to plug speakers into the headphone socket on the front instead.  I'd already figured that one, haha.

Oh, and its name is Trillian.  Replacing Arthur the laptop. (See also: Marvin the phone, and Zaphod the work laptop)

tags: gadgets geeky linux