I have no additional knowledge regarding the continuing Song of Ice and Fire series, though i wish i did. Those who have read this series and know me very well (Austin/Alfonso) may have already deduced that my primary laptop (formarly named Arya) has bitten the bullet, and that I have installed linux on the hardware. This is as a result of my overly complex naming scheme whereby machines are given names from House Lannister if they are running Linux and names from House Stark if they are running Windows. The system is further complicated by the distinction that clients get female names and servers get male names. Hence Tywin is the Linux file server/gateway, Catelyn is the Media box running Windows MCE and Tommen is a Linksys WRT54G which calims to be something else, but is actually running Linux under the hood.
Anyway, my laptop was Arya (Sansa is a tool) but through repeated crashes and a general malaise towards XP paired with a lack of desire for Vista, I pushed back into the territory of laptop Linux with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft. And it Just Works ™. The extent to which this shocks me is difficult to understate. I tried to run Gentoo Linux on nearly identical hardware almost two years ago and met with a near total lack of success. Wireless was a pain in the butt and buggy as hell (where the worm never dies). X would crash not infrequently. Even browsing the web was crappy because of the lack of standards and the inability to just fire up IE. Don’t even get me started about trying to get Suspend to disk to work. All those things worked out of the box. Suspending to disk for the first time, i nearly flipped out. The biggest surprise is wireless. For the past year or so i’ve been using USB wireless adapters because my internal wireless card just would not work under Linux. I popped open the Gnome networking configuration dialog, popped in the SSID, the WEP key and it Just Worked.
There are still things that are going to be problematic (Visual Studio) but they shouldn’t be insurmountable. And to think I was considering getting a MacBook. Bah!