I spent a couple of hours and came up with a list of issues we need to address, both for this particular laptop model and any future ones.

1. Power management: settings may need to be tweaked. While on that topic:
   • Suspend seems to work ok out of the box.
   • Hibernate appears to be utterly broken. It could be the closed-source nvidia drivers (display is corrupt when resuming), but without those drivers, we can't get 1650x1080 resolution.
2. We need to find a decent off-campus Ubuntu mirror to use as the default. ca.archive.ubuntu.com seems slow from a Rogers connection, although they could be just plain slow because they're getting hammered in prep for the upcoming release.
3. Bluetooth defaults to on and discoverable. That's insane. How can we default this to off? It seems to be a per-user setting.
4. /etc/network/interfaces seems to cause issues with getting wireless working. See end for a working version.
5. Brightness keys don't work at all in X, they seem to work in console mode.
6. The volume control buttons don't seem to do anything, but in any case...
7. Sound doesn't work.
8. DVD movies: we might as well pre-install the codecs.
9. Still need to test if we can connect to WPA2 access points, or any APs at all.
10. Do not use the 386 kernel, which seems to somehow get installed. Use generic instead. This will support the dual-core CPU.
11. Still need to test the front-mounted card reader and the 1394 port. (Is that for cameras?)
12. It may be possible (with PAM changes) to make the fingerprint reader work.

I'm sure there's more, but this is plenty to start with. Curiously, I observed when I enabled wobbly windows (Extra visual effects under appearance preferences), Firefox would not approach the top of the display in GNOME. Changing settings back to Normal allowed

Working =/etc/network/interfaces

If you have trouble with wireless, try setting your interfaces file to this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Packages we should install over the defaults

texlive cvs svn ubuntu-restricted-extras (this includes Java 6) Whatever gets us DVD movie codecs. -- MikePatterson - 08 Oct 2007