adric: books icon (c) 2004 adric.net (Default)
All decks report smooth sailing so far. This ship is really fast. The Ubuntu 12 seems fine and I'm starting to get used to Unity, such that I haven't replaced it. There's a bit of a rant about how much nicer this all is that recent Apple kit that I can't argue with much over on O'Reilly Radar. Once you get used to Unity1 (or replace it with something that suits you, the OS is just out of the way and you can hack, write, read (Kindle Cloud works well on here, finished Reamde that way last night) or whatever you want.

Engineering is still working on some little glitches. Wifi is too slow to reconnect after boot and lots of us are still having a little trouble with the touchpad capturing touches and shifting focus around. All tracked on Launchpad for the interested.

Beyond the slick hardware and the Ubuntu drivers (both quite nice) the project is working on chef recipes for common development and testing environments to make it easy to get into and out of them and set up "microclouds" on the ultrabook. I'm poking at this and I'll let you know how it goes.

valentina here has so far been quite nice for my Chrome, Thunderbird, and Virtual Box needs as I study how to read packets in this year's SANS course.

ETA: Seems I need to learn some Chef first. I'll start here once I get done with my packet mangling for the day.
--

1: Unity has keyboard shortcuts and they are shockingly good overall. Although there are pages online that explain the Unity keyboard shortcuts and i started there I found by accident that these are in Unity: hold down Super to see the help screen!
adric: books icon (c) 2004 adric.net (Default)
I've volunteered for #ProjectSputnik, an effort to make a developer-friendly build available on a Dell laptop. The Project has done quite well from surveys and inital software forays and a product will be released later this year, we are told, on the lovely new Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook.

So given the opportunity to help out I bought one, am running their current Ubuntu Precise build on it, and so far it's pretty slick. They have made great strides on getting the drivers working and it's quite a nice piece of hardware as well.

Here are my intial notes, taken on Evernote on another box while I fussed with boot media:

Hmmm ... my USB stick was no good, had to make another one.

Installing from the Sputnik image stick seems smooth and quick.
I decided to put Ubuntu on sda3 (the large NTFS Windows was on) and leave the rest be for now, no swap.
No support for some special keys in installer (live) image but that's not a big deal.

brightness work up and down
battery button brings up power status app, rather than overlays
nothing for kb lights, video. didn't try wifi or audio during install

Reboot. login .. really fast reboot and login, nice!

audio on login and volume controls work well
wifi button works, dropped me right offline ;)
play controls don't work in VLC
let's see if I can post all this from tina...

Box design is cool!
Box

Lid is hinged, nice presentation!
Lide

Windows sticker came off easily enough but this may have to fixed in manufacturing:

Windows logo etching

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