First, forgive me for the cheesy title of this post. Its 6 am and I am jetlagged. After a successful trip to Italy and Finland, I am finally back home and what a pleasure it was to find that my new notebook had finally arrived! I got a new X300 Thinkpad with a solid-state drive and a bunch of goodies, that I won't go into. At least, not yet. The first thing I did after booting into the machine was to check the drive space. The laptop comes with Microsoft Vista pre-installed. There was no way around it.

The next thing I did? Slide in the Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 CD into the drive (yes, unlike the MacBook Air, this one actually has an optical drive) and reboot. The CD booted without a hitch. After a quick inspection, I ran the install and a few minutes later, I had Hardy Heron running on the Thinkpad.

And now, for the miracles. There are a few. Power management works. I can suspend and resume!!! What an incredible pleasure to be able to do that. After many attempts with suspend and resume, I am happy to see that Hardy does this out of the box. Of course, YMMV, etc. because a lot depends on the hardware, but it finally works for me

A couple of packages later, I have the fingerprint recognition thingie working. Sweet! Camera works with Ekiga out of the box.

So, there must be something that doesn't work, right? Yes, it seems the audio chip is way too new, so ALSA does not work. At least the package I have does not. There are ways to get around it. A recompile will fix it, or I just need to wait a bit for the updates to Linux kernel 2.6.26 and it will all be there.

The fan keeps spinning, and that seems to be a glitch that needs more research. Other than that, its all good! The Solid State Drive is incredibly fast. I tend to hear "ghost clicks" - clicking sounds from a hard drive that does not spin, but I suppose that years of being used to a laptop with a spinning dirve, my mind almost expects it. Strange.

Did I mention that suspend/resume works?