These are just a few experiences of my life with ubuntu on my Dell C400 laptop. Generally speaking these are great experiences. I mainly write these up for myself so I don't forget things. If there are any errors, or inaccuracies please do let me know.

Upgrade: from Breezy Badger (5.10) to Dapper (6.06)

This worked beautifully. I just and simply followed the instructions on here, ie

  • uninstalled xscreensaver
  • made sure my Breezy Badger system and my update manager were up-to-date
  • replaced my sources.list by this
  • switched to console (Alt+F1)
  • typed sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get update and all began.
  • at some point, the x server crashed and I got an unresponsive black screen with some ugly vertical white lines. The machine seemed quiet, so I powered it down. It booted happily, but synaptic told me things were not ok and I should run sudo dpkg --configure -a which I did and things seem to work fine, apart from the few issues below.

Some issues and some solutions

  • Video driver failure: On Breezy Badger (5.10), switching to text console (alt+F1) would bring the X server down, and there would be no other options than restarting the machine. This is a very simple workaround, which works very well. I now can run both ion2 and gnome and switch between them without any problems.
  • Somehow openoffice.org was nowhere despite synaptic telling me it was installed. I uninstalled all possible openoffice bits, and then ran sudo apt-get install openoffice.org. This solved the problem. IMPORTANT: With Breezy Badger, OpenOffice2 couldn't draw straight lines -- lines ended up looking like hourglasses. This bug is gone with Dapper.
  • DVD player jumps: adjust hdparm.conf by typing sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc as in here
  • sshfs gives me the error: fusermount: failed to open /dev/fuse: No such file or directory which is easily fixed by running sudo modprobe fuse
  • Matlab works fine (whitout the usual error message)
  • There are a few good hints here
  • gparted got uninstalled -- sudo apt-get install gparted
  • Vim 7: Dapper ships with Vim 6. To install Vim 7, add deb http://www.freshnet.org/debian/ dapper/ to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and run apt-get update && apt-get apt-get upgrade

Dell C400 / Ubuntu Dapper hibernate works :-)

  • Follow instructions here. This works beautifully. It hibernates (suspends to disk and shuts down) and then resumes nicely and cleanly. Awesome!