Ubuntu 8.04 LTS running very well

I don't know why I'm compelled to continually report on how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is running on the $0 Laptop, but I keep doing it.

From the graphical polish to Suspend/Resume, Alps touchpad control and everything else I've done with it, this is the most impressive Linux distribution I've run thus far.

For use on this laptop -- a Gateway Solo 1450 -- it's better than Debian Lenny, my other go-to OS.

Today I tried a live CD of Fedora 9, since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 supposedly has beefed up its support of Suspend/Resume on laptops, I figured that maybe, just maybe, that functionality was present in Fedora 9.

It very well might be, but in the Fedora 9 live environment, Suspend/Resume doesn't work on this laptop.

Moving on to Debian, in the Lenny updates I installed today, there was a new kernel among them. I booted into it after the update, and the new 2.6.24 kernel still doesn't support the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip on the Gateway.

In order to have working sound, I'm still using the original Lenny 2.6.22 kernel, which does support the chip. I do understand that I can manually add the module I need to support sound in the new kernel, but I'm waiting to see if and when Debian decides that it would like a certain number of its users to enjoy sound. Until then, I'll stick with 2.6.22.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS supports sound just fine on the laptop, even with a 2.6.24 kernel. Score another one for Ubuntu. If the binary blob in the kernel for the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip were the only such blob left in the kernel as configured by Debian, then I'd understand its sudden exclusion from the distribution, but I have a very good feeling that this is not the case.

I will consider adding the sound modules myself, as detailed in one of the relevant bug reports, but I'll more than likely turn to Ubuntu for the simple reason that it just runs better. And this is coming from a person who has championed Debian quite a bit. (As an aside, I love bug reports that give you a fix for the problem that often works but leaves the bug intact to a) annoy some users and b) drive others away.)

I've thought about it quite a bit. If you're running a standard desktop computer, it's easy to make just about any Linux distribution work well, if it will work at all. You're not often worrying about unsupported touchpads, uncontrolled CPU fans, flaky or nonexistant Suspend/Resume, other power-management issues and the like. I can run Debian Etch with carefree abandon on some of my desktop systems, but getting Etch to work well with an Alps Touchpad is just not in the cards ... or maybe it is, since I found some new suggestions for configuring xorg.conf to make the Alps perform better. But since I've made the move to Lenny, I'm probably not going back to Etch on that system, even though the sound-chip issue continues to piss me off.