About 12 months ago I bought a shiny new netbook, and tried to dual boot it with Ubuntu 12.10, or there abouts, with mixed results.

It worked.. okay, but for some reason, I couldn't upgrade to 13.04 when it came out, and once Windows 8.1 got it's teeth into things, well, that was the end of that.

However, after a few months of Ballmer pain, I decided to attempt to get Ubuntu working on it again.

And it look all of 10 minutes. Most of that was downloading new updates.

Canonical/Ubuntu have done a lot of work to make sure that hardware can just work, and it does. This machine is working well. Mind you, I did opt to completely remove Windows 8. I'm pretty sure at this stage this is a good thing (I do have a backup of the recovery partition [that 20G filesystem that eats into the 128GB SSD] in case of Enterprise)

All that aside, there are still a few things that should be done to any fresh Ubuntu install, in my humble opinion:

  • Remove zeitgeist.
  • Settings > Security and Privacy: Disable the Search and History settings
  • Install the basics: `inkscape mplayer konsole build-essential gedit vim git pidgin`
  • Disable sound on Pidgin
  • Install Chrome, Dropbox from their respective outlets.
  • Settings > Appearance > Behavior: Autohide Launcher. Or remove Unity all together. Your choice.
  • Rename `/usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg` to something else. Then you don't get the drums at start up .(There is no settings-driven way to stop this in 14.04 apart from de-referencing the sound asset)
Update 2015-01-29 - A few more things on this:
  • For the love of all things holy, install on USB with UEFI enabled. You will get but better results
  • For the love of sriacha, install an LTS version. Do not do what I tried to do and go "Oh, Utopic sounds fun.." No. Trusty has out of the box hardware support for this laptop. Utopic doesn't. Staring at a full-brightness screen doesn't do anything good for your eyes
  • I have untold respect for the people who make and package hardware drivers. I know for sure I would have revereted back to virtual machines on a Windows base if this hadn't worked. I would have been very sad if it came to that, however.