A few days ago a bought a new laptop: a DELL Inspiron 1525 (T8100 processor, 4GB RAM, 320GB hard disk). I chose it because all hardware (except the wireless card) is Intel based (audio/video) and I like Intel’s policy about open source drivers.

Everything is working smoothly, I had to configure nothing! Compiz works wonderfully and everything else too.

But here comes a little problem, I need to create screencast, the built-in mic is not so good thus I plug-in an external mic and start gtk-recordMyDesktop.

Ugly surprise, the audio is choppy and I can’t get it to work… I tried some workarounds found here and there but none is working :-(

Another problem, when I record a long screencast, gtk-recordMyDesktop hangs during the export phase.

I didn’t experience none of these troubles with my old laptop (DELL Inspiron 6000).

Can someone point me in the right direction?

I was looking at the Dell Ubuntu PC page and I was counting in my mind… there was something strange about prices, later I found this really good comparison.

Talking about the inspiron model, Ubuntu costs 80$ less than Vista Basic, but Ubuntu PC has Intel graphic while Vista PC has ATI X1400, there’s a price difference between the two cards which turn down the price difference on the whole PC to about 30-40$.

Anyway at least a big step it’s done and buyers can be sure about hardware compatibility and (personal note) the Intel graphic cards do their job the right way (and have open drivers, thank you Intel for that)!

Taken from this article on businessweek:

Dell Inc. has agreed to work with Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. under an alliance the rival software makers formed last year to make it easier for the Windows operating system and the increasingly popular Linux system to work together

Dell surely have its own reasons to choose Ubuntu for the desktop and Novell for the server but… could it be that Microsoft was not too happy for the Dell/Ubuntu partnership [...]?

Dell (ubuntu-pc) and Intel (ubuntu mobile) have just signed some sort of partnership with Canonical/Ubuntu, but I’m asking myself why now and why Ubuntu?

I think the answer is composed by two parts:

1. Ubuntu has a solid company behind (and also a big community, but NOT ONLY a community)
2. Ubuntu was created in the name of freedom (I hope the trademark issue will be resolved in the near future)

We also had other big Linux companies such as Red Hat and Novell but the real difference between them and Ubuntu is freedom, Ubuntu has always released every part of its system as free software, unlike the others did.

Well, actually there’s also debian which lies behind Ubuntu and that’s a good thing but I don’t really think Dell and Intel cares about debian

I think Dell and Intel care about interacting with a big company and not just with a community, wich would not help maintaining a solid relationship with business based target, but they also care about trusting in the products, and what’s better than free software? Free licenses give partners a major stability about the future for fund investments for the many reasons we all know.

That’s why Ubuntu wins the race, now all the others should adapt their business and re-enter the race

If you read any news website in these days you already know that Dell officially announced that will (in the next few weeks) start selling Ubuntu (7.04 feisty fawn) based PCs.

That’s wonderful, you know what I think about that

Now? What will other distributors do?

It seems that Toshiba is already thinking to linux-PCs, now I’m reading that HP could do the same.

Nice to see all this movement around Linux hu? I’m pretty pleased about that, we’ll still have to wait a lot to see linux-PCs in the mall near home but… when it will happen we’ll have a stronger Ubuntu, more interested people (and companies) and thus more developers and people will start asking: «hey what’s that Linux?» and so on.

Good times are coming for the free software :)