Today I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on a discarded Dell Latitude x200 laptop that one of my neighbors was disowning after upgrading a MacBook Pro.

This was good because my wife was needing a cheap laptop just to be able to check email when travelling.

Originally, this laptop was running Windows 2000. It's a 800 MHz Pentium III with a  60 GB drive and a pretty dead battery.

Just a perfect opportunity to wipe Windows and install the new release of Ubuntu.

Installation went pretty well. I used my Mac to download and burn the CD ISO image of the 8.04 release candidate. And then I booted up the CD on the Dell.

Note however that this laptop does not have an internal CD device. It uses a USB external drive, which slows down the installation process considerably.  And during the install I made the mistake of choosing to look at the release notes first by clicking on the invitation to do so from the install dialog.

It took about an hour for Firefox to load from the CD drive!  And then I couldn't quit from it. So I started all over again, this time ignoring to Read The Release Notes. The rest went surprisingly smoothly.

The trick was to immediately check for updates using the system updater. There were over a hundred updated packages, I guess in preparation for the official release of 8.04 on Thursday.

Firefox 3 was already installed, but not Thunderbird. The Synaptic Package Manager discovered the Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0...12 release and installed it.

I couldn't get the Dlink Air-Plus 650+ card that came with the laptop to work. But I did have an AirLink 101 card and it worked! 

So except for the battery, it seems to be working really well. I had a couple of freezes that required reboots. But that seems to have corrected itself.

I think my wife is going to be happy with Ubuntu. Total cost will be just for a new battery ($60-$99).

I'm impressed.