First Impressions: My Ubuntu-based Dell

Posted 08/10/2007 at 1:55pm | by Robert Strohmeyer

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When Dell first announced its line of preinstalled Linux PCs a couple of months ago, Maximum PC was eager to check them out. But, fearing the tough criticism for which Max PC is widely known, Dell flatly refused to send us a system to check out. We weren’t surprised, honestly, but we were a little annoyed. As it happens, though, I was in the market for a new laptop anyway, so I decided to plunk down my own personal credit card and buy a Dell Inspiron 1505N with Ubuntu preinstalled. Here’s what I think of it.

The 1505N arrived at my door yesterday, but my first impression of the machine came about a week or so earlier, when I noticed that Dell had discontinued it from their product line. I initially opted for the 1505N because it came with the option of an Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 graphics card, rather than just an integrated Intel card. Preferring 1680x1050 to 1440x900, and wanting to play a little WoW from the road, I chose the 1505N over the 1420N almost exclusively for its better graphics hardware. And I’m glad I bought when I did, because Dell took the system out of its Ubuntu product line just days after I placed my order.

Unpacking the notebook from its shipping carton revealed very little out of the ordinary, save a single Ubuntu disc sitting in the bottom. The disc is mostly a formality, as the OS is not only preinstalled on the hard drive, but also sits in reserve on a restore partition just in case I do something foolish like ‘sudo rm -Rf /*’ or whatever. This restore partition is the sort of thing I would have cared about back when I was a net admin, but I’ll most likely repartition the entire drive when it comes time to install Gutsy Gibbon or some other distro in the future. All of the drivers are available in the Ubuntu repositories anyway, so there’s little reason to tie up the disk space.

Within about 30 seconds, I had the system out of its box, plugged in, and booting on my coffee table. The 2GHz Intel T7200 CPU and 7200rpm Seagate hard drive made for a quick boot, so within another 40 seconds I was greeted by the Ubuntu configuration dialog, which prompted me to choose my language and keyboard layout, set my time zone, and set up a username and password. All in all, the whole process took about two minutes.