I haven't had a working home installation of Linux since grad school. Back then it was an ancient Red Hat on my old Toshiba Satellite Pro. Came in really handy. I eventually put Winblows back on it near the end when I lost my home-T1 access but also because I wanted to use Illustrator to work on the graphics in my Diss and a couple other pieces of software. When I finally got a new laptop some 5-odd years ago, I tried several of the newer distributions on that old Toshiba. The install scripts always failed. I did a modicum of research and with the help of a company IT guy I got X to work, like for a day. Rebooting always crashed though. I gave up and gave the laptop away. It was way old anyways with a small drive, little memory, slow processor, small screen... only thing I truly liked about it was the keyboard keys.
So after getting a new computer last year I figured it was time to do it again but with my older Dell laptop. This time, I didn't want to put a lot of time into it, I have enough personal projects to keep me busy. I was going to use the first distro that worked, starting with Gentoo. I burned the latest install CD 2006.0. Tried both install scripts with a couple different configs including the defaults and it failed each time. Did a couple searches but decided that rather than fix it I moved on to Ubuntu which I was also curious about. It worked as advertised, with only a couple gotchas.
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