Congrats. I'm very jealous. If I didn't have to run the Adobe suite of software, I think I'd have a Linux laptop as my main machine as well.

BTW, Firefox flies on this machine. With a 2.2 ghz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM, it better, but still. It's awesome. I highly recommend it if you have the time and desire to get it working, and don't need software unavailable on Linux. And that list of software is getting shorter and shorter. Ubuntu may have done the entire Linux community a huge favor by making that deal with Dell. It could be the first big step in mainstream consumer adoption of Linux.

I'm glad you are really stress testing that machine with a Firefox benchmark! Isn't that really a test of your bandwidth? Anywho, just in case you didn't know, Macs work out of the box and don't really need a How-To guide :). If you must use Ubuntu and be cool:

http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com/2007/02/13-things-to-do-immediately-a...
http://www.linux.com/articles/54945
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Main_Page

p.s. The right portion of this comment box is cut off in Firefox.

I know the box is cut off - I keep meaning to fix that and never get around to it.

I know Firefox isn't the greatest test, but it's one thing I've noticed as being faster than on my old computer. And I don't mean loading a page, I mean actually opening the browser.

Anyway, thanks for the links.

yeah, this was really helpful and was most of the base of my howto...the Alsa thing i got to work great..just theres a buzzing in the right speaker if its on very high volume. not sure if thats a hardware or Alsa thing

thanks again