Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon
October 18th, 2007 by screencastersWell, so far so good. Got Ubuntu 7.10 installed on my aging Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. I still had to manually configure my xorg.conf file for proper 1400×1050 display. My display is not even usable at boot time off of a fresh install. It looks like a scrambled satellite channel. I have to boot with Knoppix and fix my xorg.conf file manually. This is the third release that Ubuntu cannot get right in this aspect. I’m sure Dell is a little to blame for this too. In comparison openSUSE installs flawlessly on this laptop and correctly sets up my xorg.conf file. In my opinion openSUSE has better hardware detection anyway. But this isn’t a rant on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a solid distro and it’s remains one of my favorite. I’m not sure that upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10 is worth it really but I’m a sucker for the latest and greatest. Afterall, I upgraded from openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 and there wasn’t anything major in that release either. As long as I get a stable desktop experience with some improvements for my efforts then it’s worth it. 
November 11th, 2007 at 11:13 am
I have 7.10 running on my old inspiron with just 256 ram it is a bit slow how does your install fair?
November 11th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
My installs works rather well. This is just my opinion and I don’t want to get flamed for it but I have always thought that KDE runs a little faster than Gnome. Maybe try Kubuntu. Also, Xubuntu works pretty well on older equipment with lower resources. I run Xubuntu on a really old Compaq laptop with just 192mb of ram and 4mb of video. Xubuntu runs very well on this laptop. My daughter uses it to play games.
My main laptop is an aging Inspiron 8000/8100 with 512mb ram and 16mb video. The speed is satisfactory. I usually only use it for web and email anyway. I also wrote the screencasters’ website entirely on this laptop back in June.
November 19th, 2007 at 3:47 am
I just installed 7.10 on my Inspiron 8000 and I can’t get any videos to play. It appears to be a bug in the Xv implementation (hardware video acceleration for Xorg). I often use this laptop as a MythTV frontend so I’ll be going back to Feisty real soon here if I can’t get it working
More details:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=616955&highlight=Inspiron+8000+gusty
November 19th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
@EXider
I am not sure what the problem could be there. My issue is that no ubuntu distro correctly picks up my display on my Inspiron. It’s not media video related but hardware related. I think your issues are different from mine. Agree?