A brief update re: Dell Ubuntu Laptop
Iris's Debian baptism is, for all intents and purposes, complete. I installed all the developer tools on her that I'll need for contributing to GNU Octave, e2, and Debian itself. I got all of the hardware working again, with a few minor snags. For the record, here are the things that I can't get working yet:
- Wireless is a little flakey. It seems to wimp out more easily than before if the signal strength isn't good enough
- Suspend, hibernate, and battery status isn't fully working.
- My X fonts are too big.
I think number 1 will be eventually fixed as Intel improves its mostly open driver (turns out it needs binary firmware, so it's a blob after all). Number 2 I think I know how to fix, but it involves recompiling a kernel. Number 3 just needs a magic invocation in the config files that I haven't figured out yet, but it will happen.
On the upside, I got 3d effects working more beautifully than I had ever seen. I've also decided to use the GNOME desktop, ditching KDE after many years of service. Everything else also works beautifully in Debian now (although it took quite a bit of tweaking).
Iris is finally the Debian lappy I always wanted her to be.