Dell’s Shipping Options

As per my recent post, I recently got my self some new hardware. The total cost of that hardware was somewhere around expensive and filthy expensive, and the shipping costs were addon on were just above filthy expensive. Also, it took Dell 2 working days to prepare it for shipping, where my only alteration on the laptop was changing it to a SSD over a conventional hard disk. Not a huge change. When it was finally shipped, I got no email notification about it right away, in fact, I only got an email from them 4 days after it had shipped with the invoice and they were even assuming it was already delivered (which it was not).

Getting back into Linux

So it has been a while since I ran Linux. Mostly because I had spent such an amount of money into my home computer, and felt it was a shame that I was not using it to full effect. So I started playing games using Crossover Office, but I constantly felt the games were not as good as they could be. I was dealing with bugs not allowing me to configure better graphics, random freezes etc. In the end, I concluded that Wine or Crossover is not the future, it is much better to live with Windows and use it for what you need.

But recently I was watching a video on Youtube and saw an ad for Intel 2 in 1. I was intrigued, and did some more Googling and ended up buying a Dell XPS 12, on a whim.

Ubuntu 13.10 on XPS 12

I recently got my laptop, after over 2 weeks of waiting. Immediately I removed Windows 8 in favour of Ubuntu 13.10. As the XPS 12 does not have a built in CD drive, I had to make a live USB and in that process I bricked 2 USB sticks which I luckily had gotten for free. Anyway for installation there were a few minor annoyances. I had to turn off SafeBoot in BIOS and for good measure I turned off UEFI as well. I never did try to boot in UEFI mode, but the BIOS never recognized my live USB as a UEFI disk, so I figured it was just as well not doing it that way.