I had a problem with the right LCD hinge of my previous laptop a Winbook J4 733E pro. I sent the laptop back to be repaired and it's back and working perfectly. That laptop had Mandriva 2005 on it. In the meantime, I've been using a toshiba laptop with ubuntu dapper drake on it. I'm now trying to decide which laptop to stick with.
Ubuntu won't install on the Winbook. It fails around 80% of the way through the install progress bar. I'd forgotten that ubuntu wouldn't install here. So I've installed Mandriva 2006 (I don't have 2007 yet since I'd stepped away from Mandriva for the duration). It's now (slowly) downloading upgrades and new packages that I didn't install from the DVD but which have been upgraded so they need to be downloaded.
I like the winbook and can deal with its minuses (mainly the fact that it looks lived in, it doesn't look brand new by any means, plus the weight and the fact that it runs hotter than the toshiba since that's a desktop P4 chip in there, not a mobile P4). The Toshiba certainly is prettier, but pretty is actually a minus with me. A laptop (and a motorcycle, or shoes, etc) that doesn't look lived in doesn't feel as good or as comfortable.
On the other hand, I don't know how to get the wifi on the winbook working. This was never a problem before since I was always wired. But now that we've got wifi at home, if the wifi doesn't work, then I can't use the laptop (well, I could buy a PCMCIA card I guess, or a USB wifi device that linux supports). That's probably the biggest problem. I was getting used to the crypto /home filesystem on ubuntu and I'll need to figure out how to get that working in Mandriva.
While trying to get Ubuntu installed on the winbook (I swapped the toshiba and winbook drives due to drive size) I might have made a mistake with the ubuntu gui installer and trashed my encrypted /home partition. I'm keeping the partition around for a while (lots of space on this drive) and I'll try to recover the data later, if that's possible.
All in all, it's going to be an eventful distro switching Christmas experience. If I get tired of all this, well, I'll probably just switch back to the Toshiba, although I need to figure out some things. Among other things, the toshiba turns itself off when I run anything extremely CPU intensive (like a chess game) that runs for a long time (say 5 minutes). This doesn't happen in Windows (I'm told), so the current conjecture is that toshiba has special thermal control functionality that its windows drivers know about, but which Linux doesn't know about, so linux doesn't know how to make the fans spin faster, or whatever is needed to keep the laptop from turning itself off.
Damn, I might have to sell both of these laptops and get a lightweight, less powerful, non-desktop-replacement laptop for everyday use. I've got two other lightweight winbooks for just that purpose (everything works perfectly except for sound, but that's easy, I've got that working before, I just don't remember what module to load), but I like the power of the toshiba and the Winbook J4, so I'll try to get them both working first before giving up, restoring windows on them, and selling them at a bit of a loss.
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