Just installed Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" onto my blue laptop of death, and its certainly another update. Sound is borked like what seems to happen every other update, and the wifi led is working after being down since Intrepid (8.10) or so. Installed Abiword, probably gonna remove OpenOffice to save SSD space. The Software Center doesn't seem to work, which is fine. I know how to use Synaptic.

I'm a little concerned about the sudden loss of sound, but then again there's probably some module that isn't loading, which will force me to gedit my /etc/modules. Probably gonna have to do that with pciehp as well because of the card reader "issue."

The card reader "issue" is as much a ROM BIOS issue as a driver one. The AAO is about the only model of computer to actually have more than one card reader, and HAL is still not able to handle it quite right. But there's also the fact that the AAO's factory BIOS is really buggy, although flashing to v.3309 still doesn't fix everything. Me, I've heard too many horror stories of people who flashed improperly and bricked their computer, so I'm sticking to factory. Bugs and all.

Then there's the guy who had a virus flash the ROMs on his Compaq Presario. He never did quite get that computer fixed...