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Having computers at home means your holidays will be spent on them. Last Christmas, I fought a Windows virus. This Thanksgiving weekend, my old computer gao-2002 became unbearably unreliable.

I guess that's what Black Friday is for. So I got up early in the morning and went to Best Buy and Office Depot looking for bargains. I haven't been looking at computer systems for the last couple of years so I don't know what to expect. I'm surprised to find a Intel(R) Core 2 Quad system with 8GB RAM and 750 GB hard drive at a reasonable price. So that's what I took home.

It's an HP Pavilion Elite with 64-bit Vista Home Premium SP1. And maybe it's the quad-core CPU, or maybe it's the 8GB of RAM, Vista is not slow on this machine, unlike on the dual-core/2GB laptop from last year. It even has a pre-installed JRE.

Vista's "Shrink Volume" disk management feature makes it really easy to free up disk partition space for my GNU/Linux installation. For this machine, I chose the newly released Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop amd64. While its installation is really streamlined and consumer-oriented, there were a few glitches that threw me off balance.

The first hurdle is the partition setup screen:

The good thing about the screen is that it has graphics that illustrate what each choice will do. The bad thing about the screen is that the illustration does not match the selection. I know I want to use the largest contiguous free space, but that's not what the graphics shows. I ended up manually editing the partition table.

Another, more serious, problem is that the Ubuntu 8.10's NetworkManager does not save its settings in a way that would survive a reboot. During installation, Ubuntu 8.10 detected the Ethernet card and configured it to be "Automatic (DHCP)", which works fine for web browsing but is not enough for sshd. Again, there is a very intuitive way to change it with the NetworkManager tray icon:

After I change the method to "Manual" and put in all the information and click OK, I can restart the connection using the tray icon and my change would take effect. However if I reboot the machine, my setting will go back to "Automatic (DHCP)".

This is very frustrating. So frustrating that I would recommend against using Ubuntu 8.10 if DHCP is not sufficient for your network needs.