I’ve signed up for a masters in UCD (Advanced Software Engineering in University College Dublin) starting in December. I’m really looking forward to it and as a treat I bought a new (used) laptop that’ll be just for Uni work. It’s an IBM Thinkpad T43 (Centrino 1.7Ghz and 1GB ram with 40GB HD, Wifi, Bluetooth, PCMCIA, Expresscard and all the other usuals) I bought it on ebay (where else?) for £240 delivered. The build quality is excellent and I’m very happy with it. I’ve got Ubuntu 8.04 running on it and it’s going quite well. I’ve encountered the following problems:

• I get an “not enough memory” error when I try and hibernate
• Wireless seems kind of flaky especially with the upgraded NetworkManager, I can’t connect to my Dad’s network and keep getting a 169 IP address but this happens on my Vaio too so I suspect it is the Intel Wireless hardware and my Dad’s DHCP server not playing nice together.
• I can’t get mobile broadband working (either using the new NetworkManager or UMTSMON)
• Audio when playing video took a while to get working and had to change from Pulse to the ALSA sound architecture.

Lest not forget that there are millions of positives with Ubuntu, especially the Synaptic package manager and power management.

I’m loving Gnome and I’m trying to find a few cycles to play with MonoDevelop properly. I’ve been trying to get the localising feature in MonoDevelop working with an ASP.NET web application but no joy yet. I can get it working on a command line app though :).