Hi i noticed that they started selling the dell inspiron notebook with ubuntu pre-installed, unfortunatlly i live in canada and they do not offer ubuntu on the Canadian versions of the ispiron, I was just wondering if i am correct to assume that installing ubuntu on my own will run as smoothly, has anyone from Canada or the U.S. for that matter has tried installing it on there own.

FYI, I have an Inspiron 1501 (AMD Turion 64, 1Gb RAM) that I was able to install OpenSUSE 10.2 on with no problems, dual-booting with the existing WinXP installation (after shrinking the XP partition with gparted.) I did have to use ndiswrapper for the wireless network adapter, but I was able to use the XP driver that was already on the machine for that. I would assume installing Ubuntu would be more or less the same, maybe even easier.

I have a dell 1705, and it works MUCH better with opensuse 10.2 that it did with vista Even games perform better with its nvidia card.


I had to use cedega to run windows games
I had to try about 12 different versions of the nvidia driver to find one that performed well
I upgraded to 2gb of ram
I had to upgrade the kernel to newer than what it ships with using a non-standard repository in order to get my wireless card working properly. Ndiswrapper was VERY bad, it would lock up the machine, but now with this newer kernel and bcm43xx driver, its perfect.


All in all, I am very happy with the way my machine is running now. Opensuse 10.3 is out now, that may take the wireless issues easier to deal with, but I am not inclined to upgrade with everyting working so well. If I had to reinstall for some reason, I would... but I have been using linux long enough that a reinstall is typically only needed with a new hard drive