With just three days to go before the official launch of Ubuntu 8.10 and its variants, I've switched from Xubuntu (yet another Drupal site!) one to plain old Ubuntu. This is mostly because I spent an evening last week blitzing my laptop's hard drive and installing a vanilla Ubuntu 8.10 beta.

Xfce and Thunar were faves of mine way back when running SomeRandomDistro, which led me to using it on my Dell Inspiron 1501. Kudos should be given here to redDEAD over at Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1501 for all the tips. Things were reasonably good, but there seemed to always be issues. Broken ATI drivers, naff in-built Wi-Fi card, me being a mong, etc etc...

So far the beta (its now RC, folks) has been awesome. Pretty much all those niggles I had previously on this 'top have been fixed/addressed/alleviated/vanisherated:

• Compiz, or probably the ATI/fglrx drivers, work without fuss or having something weird like one X session within another going on
• volume control works, via the Fn keys or a panel icon
• screen brightness adjustments works, via the Fn keys or a panel icon
• network/wireless set up was easy, but I've yet to try WPA again (something was seriously afoot here with the inbuilt Wifi card)
• Flash player for Firefox seems less crashy, was an issue getting this to work on an amd64

Depending on one's point of view, these could be down to (a) various things being fixed in the latest release; or perhaps more likely (b) me still being a bit of a noobus when it comes to Linux's innards and running a bodged up distribution on a piece of crap Dell.