Introduction
Some months ago I got an Acer TravelMate 4000 laptop from my work. It came with Windows XP Home Edition SP 2 preinstalled, but because I like Linux more, I wanted to install Linux on it. I had some install cd's lying around (Mandrake 10.1, Ubuntui 4.10 and Gentoo) and chose to go for Mandrake, because that's the distro used at my work. I remember trying Ubuntu, but unsuccesful at that time, I got a blank screen after some boot messages.
Mandrake 10.1. It worked, but with glitches
Installing Mandrake 10.1 was rather painfull, if I recall correctly. After I added some "contrib" package sources (or however they are called properly), I could install the applications I needed/wanted like kdevelop and LyX. That way I was able to do some real work. But I had some problems too.
For example I couldn't find Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbird in the package listings, so I had to install them myself. It's not hard, but not gracefull. Beside that I tried to install some RPM's, sometimes succesfull, sometimes not. Something very annoying was a problem during boot. During every boot "netprofile" (some Mandrake thing for managing network configuration) waited for some timeout or something and freezed the boot procedure for 2 minutes. Moreover I had to activate (ifup eth0) the network myself after log in because netprofile failed (I think). I spend/lost many time on looking/googling for a solution, without result. I didn't succeeded in getting the power management right (ACPI, APC and such). Related with that: Mandrake couldn't shut the laptop down. After the shut down message "Power down" nothing happened and I had to press the power button for some seconds to power it down manually. Not very convenient. I also wasn't able to solve a keyboard problem related with dead keys and xmodmap. In a nutshell, Mandrake 10.1 worked more or less, but it wasn't very comfortable working with (booting, shut down, installing software, typing, ...)
Kubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog: so far so good
Today (3 aug 2005) I dared to switch to Ubuntu. Actually I downloaded the Kubuntu install cd because I'm more familiar to KDE than Gnome.
The install was pretty straightforward. The only "special" thing I had to do was to give an extra boot parameter vga=771 before booting the install cd, otherwise I would end up with a black screen after some boot messages. I had no real problems with the rest of installation. The text based interface is not as fancy as the graphical installation procedures of other distributions I've seen like Mandrake, Fedora and Suse, but it doesn't ask as many questions, which is nice (for most human beings). There's for example no boring "check the software packages you want to install" part during installation. It's more comfortable to do it after installation. And so I did. After loging in to KDE 3.4 I started "kynaptic" (KDE's synaptic clone) and started installing packages which I needed/would need. It worked very nice and fast (compared to installing, aka compiling, software on my Gentoo powered desktop PC).