i started a dist-upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 on my work laptop last night. it wasn’t finished when i woke up cause i was prompted to replace a couple of system files i had modified. for the most part the upgrade was uneventful, although i did have to play the nvidia module swap game when the system booted.

nvidia module swap game
1. ctrl+alt+F1 to switch to a different virtual console
2. sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop to kill off X
3. sudo sh ./NVIDIA*.run hopefully you downloaded this before the upgrade. heh #
4. copy a working xorg.conf into place, remove any xorg.conf.failsafe
5. sudo /etc/intit.d/gdm start

i did a quick test to see if hibernate works, nope… i’ll have to poke around to see what i’m missing. no biggie since i haven’t had hibernate work for awhile anyhow. i’m still not too sure about firefox 3 beta 5 though…. i have a ton of extensions that don’t work now. boo.

only 5 more days! i haven’t updated either one of my boxes running 8.04 beta in a few days because i finally have a stable setup for the moment. i’m planning on backing everything up on the laptop and doing a clean 8.04 install after the final comes out. the ubuntu laptop testing team has a pretty comprehensive dell latitude d620 page, and it looks like suspend/hibernate are working again. sweet!

another contender for a laptop is the hp tx2000z. it’s another deal i’ve spotted @ slickdeals a few times, $500 off any $1399 hp notebook. actually i guess it’s not a contender because i actually bought it before i finished this post.

amd turion 64 x2 dual-core mobile gold blah blah 2.4ghz, 2gb ddr2 mem, geforce 6150, touch screen & pen….

it looks like there might be some work needed to get the usb wacom tablet to work, but there’s always the 30 day return policy (i should re-read that) if i really can’t get it to work under ubuntu.

hp tx2000z reviews [ notebook review | hp | cnet | tabletpcreviews | computershopper | pcmag ]

surprisingly enough someone has already installed osx on the hp tx2000z: