I just got an Asus V6Va. It’s a handsome laptop. The screen is just about the best laptop screen I’ve ever seen. A glossy-but-low-glare, 1400×1050 pixel, 15″ screen on a low-profile, lightweight chassis.

With the help of my former supervisor, Dave, whose last day was yesterday , I got Fedora Core 6 installed. I found packages for most of what I needed, got the monitor working, got the Syntaptics touchpad working well (easily), got the wireless card… oh, yeah: the wireless card is where things went wrong. So I downloaded the latest Ubuntu and put the CD in.

The Ubuntu installation was not a breeze. The Ubuntu CD couldn’t even start correctly; upon booting, the screen was totally blank. The way I got past this was by hitting CTRL-ALT-F5 to switch to a terminal console. Then I did

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