I’ve been needing a notebook refresh for awhile and was planning to get a HP dv1000 (1280×768 display, ~5.2 pounds, under $1000, good Linux compatibility, and Nathan seemed to like his similar model).

Then I realized that I could get a laptop with a 1920×1200 (WUXGA) display. I had to have one. I missed the 1600×1200 21″ CRT I used for years and there’s reasonable sounding research that more screen is an easy productivity boost.

I bought a Dell Inspiron 6000 (my first choice was a Dell Latitude D810, for its trackpoint, but I couldn’t justify a several hundred dollar premimum for an otherwise similarly equipped machine).

A number of people told me that 1920×1200 on a 15 inch widescreen would be impossible to read. Not true at all. Some people also told me that a nearly 7 pound laptop would be a major drag. So far it hasn’t been. Apart from a tiny Inspiron 2100 I used temporarily for several months this one is about the weight I’m accustomed to (and I walk or bicycle 5 to 15 miles on days I don’t telecommute–I vastly prefer this to “working out”).

I think the large monitor productivity study is right. I feel more productive than I have since giving up my desktop and 21″ CRT. If you spend most of the day doing “knowledge work” in front of a computer, especially programming, get yourself a super high resolution display pronto.

I encountered a couple of oddities regarding the WUXGA display after installing Ubuntu Linux on the new machine.

First, Ubuntu’s installer correctly detected the 1920×1200 display and Intel 915 (GMA900) graphics. The generated /etc/X11/xorg.conf only had modelines for 1920×1200. However, the driver was unaware of the 915’s support for 1920×1200, so X ran at 1600×1200. I’m surprised it ran at all, given that xorg.conf contained no configuration for that resolution.

The other odd thing is that the entire screen was used to display 1600×1200 pixels–everything was stretched horizontally by 20 percent. I would’ve strongly expected 1600×1200 running on a 1920×1200 LCD screen to not use the screen’s full width–320 horizontal pixels should’ve been unused. Every description of LCD screens that I’ve (very casually) read says something about each (discrete) pixel being controlled by an individual transistor. There’s no tweaking display size or orienting the display with an LCD like there is with a CRT. My uneducated guess is that X was using subpixel rendering or some similar method to stretch 1600 virtual pixels onto 1920 real pixels. [Update 20051122: As Brian suggests in a comment below the stretching is done by hardware and controlled by BIOS settings–“LCD Panel Expansion” on the Inspiron 6000, enabled by default.]

The problem was fixed by running 915resolution, following this example:

• Download 915resolution
• make install (or just copy the binary provided)
• Create /etc/init.d/rc.local with a single line:
  

  /usr/sbin/915resolution 49 1920 1200

• sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/rc.local
• sudo update-rc.d rc.local start 80 S .

After rebooting X ran beautifully at 1920×1200.

Ubuntu Linux 5.10 is due shortly, so some very uncareful observations on 5.04 (version numbers are date-based, releases come every six months) before they become super stale:

Network installation from Windows was almost trivial, though InstallUbuntu.exe would be welcome. The only non-trivial part was partition resizing. I’m completely comfortable setting up partitions (e.g., with fdisk), but based only on installer feedback, I was not certain it would attempt to resize a Windows partition, so I backed out and resized before installing.

I was very happy to find that the display, sound, ethernet, wifi, and hibernate (suspend-to-disk) all worked with no manual configuration, a minor miracle based on past experience. However, this is on a three year old computer (Dell Inspiron 2100). (Sleep/suspend-to-memory didn’t work under Windows 2000 and I haven’t tried fixing it under either OS.)

The most annoying thing about Ubuntu Linux is having to semi-manually install proprietary code for Flash and various media codecs. However, ubuntuguide.org provides exact steps (usually only a few) for installing any of these. Overall I consider this an improvement over the multimedia situation on Windows, where Windows Media Player gives uniformaitve messages about missing codecs and one is often reduced to downloading codec installers from completely untrusted websites. (The most annoying thing about installing an OS, including Windows, is usually getting all of the hardware recognized and working, so I’m happy that proprietary codecs were the biggest annoyance, but here’s to open formats anyway.)

The only other real annoyance is that I don’t like the Evolution 2.2.1.1 mail/groupware client as much as I hoped (I used it as my primary mail client around 2001-3 and missed it), perhaps because I didn’t use it with IMAP previously. Evolution has no mechanism for switching to offline mode immediately,and occasionally can take many minutes to go offline. Furthermore, Evolution often gets confused when going back online, (perhaps) particularly after awakening from hibernation or switching networks, requiring closing the program, which can take several minutes in its confused state, and relaunch. Thunderbird allows one to go offline without syncing folders and never gets confused when going back online. I may switch back to Thunderbird, though I’d miss Evolution’s vFolders and calendar support.

I’m really looking forward to Ubuntu Linux 5.10, though the real test will be installation on a newer laptop.