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After quite a few glitches with installing Ubuntu 7.04 feisty on my new Dell Latitude D830 laptop I was about ready to give up and go with Suse.  It’s not that I was completely un-happy with Ubuntu, I still think its one of the best Linux varieties out there, it’s just that their builds had not yet caught up with some of the newer hardware and technology.  You may remember my post on just getting the ‘X-Windows’ system portion of the build to work correctly.  Ubuntu included fixes for the Intel graphics card in the ‘Gutsy’ build, but it is not a stable release yet, and I don’t really want to be on the edge of beta testing when it comes to that kind of thing because it usually robs you of all your time.  Time is one of those things I really don’t have much to spare.  However, while messing around on my XP desktop, (Yes I keep XP around to play a single game that I can’t get on Linux)  I noticed that there were some updates that needed to be installed on my laptop.Seemed that when I installed Ubuntu 7.04 I needed to perform several hacking exercises to get a nice clean pure resolution.  In the midsts of all that I noticed that the sound card was not working properly.  Well, after the work I put into just getting the screen to function, I was way to tired to even mess with the sound.  I justified this by telling myself I didn’t need sound anyway since it is a production unit and not a media unit.  So I went for several weeks without sound.  I contemplated throwing on Suse so I could take advantage of some ‘Novell’ capabilities but never got around to installing it.

So I clicked the ‘download updates’ button in the upper-right-hand portion of my desktop.  Now updates for Ubuntu is not an unusual thing.  In fact since installing it, I updated Ubuntu several times.  Most of these updates where in the header files or things that seemed to have no real immediate affect on the overall performance.  So I installed the updates and had them working in the background while I continued to work off my XP box.   I wanted to do some ‘full-screen’ stuff so I signed out of all my messengers on the XP box, and signed into the GAIM messenger on the Linux box.  That way I could answer messages without closing what I was currently working on.

I was working away, and I suddenly heard a ‘ding’ sound.  Not really thinking, I looked over at my laptop and saw that someone had sent me a message.  “Wait a minute!”  I said to myself. “Did I hear a sound from the lappy?”  I opened up a music file and to my shock it played!  I was so happy that this thing had seemed to ‘fix’ itself through the updates.

I am still contemplating the Suse, as I said I really need to install console one and it seems to be more native through the RPM instead of the ‘DEBS’ that Ubuntu uses.  Yes, yes, I know there is a hack for installing RPM’s onto a DEB’s based installation, but I don’t know if it is worth it to start hacking that again.  Just not getting enough time.