Handle With Linux

I happen to have a asus u6s for my job, I'm very very pleased with this laptop. It's a very nice portable notebook and in the european version there's a build in hsdpa wireless device. It's fast,stable,small,light weight and it looks very nice (just a little bit overdone with the leather covering). There's just one small problem with it:
It's only available with windows vista(At least it was at the time I got it, maybe it's available with the much more user friendly XP version of the Operating System). Of course that didn't stay on it for long it was more or less installed for about a week, that is in a dual boot configuration with Sidux. After that week something went wrong with it and it gave me a beautiful unrecoverable white screen of death. It was a very nice experience, it would have been horrible if I would have been using it to do anything more then just having some fun with it. It would have been horrifying if I was a windows user and this was my only operating system. I really dislike data loss and that is why I backup my laptop regularly(not! I'm human you know, I do backups for others and my desktop). So if I would have seen this big white screen with the enormous red letters screaming ERROR of the screen while windows was my only OS I would be crying all day.

But hey, happy me! I don't happen to like windows too much so it was no problem for me. I completely removed it and formatted the disk to ext3 so I could use it with Linux.
So I have been using the notebook for a few months and suddenly my hard disk started dying on me, no problem I just send it back to the manufacturer for RMA. When I got it back they reinstalled vista on it. Probably installed on the disk as they have them in stock I guess.

It's been on my desk for a while in this unusable state with only windows on it because I didn't have time to do anything with it. Today I decided for fun to install Ubuntu on it in a dual boot with vista. I did that last time and I shrunk the hard disk with an external tool that time. That didn't work out too well last time, I think the crashing of vista had something to do with the external resizing of the disk. I know windows is not too great an OS but I don't think it dies that easy. It would have taken some more time with a lot of crashes and a lot of beautiful error screens if it was a "normal" windows death.
So this time I took another approach.

First I used a great new windows feature:

http://www.handlewithlinux.com/node/45

That's nice because microsoft now uses partitioning in the standard installation (they are so fast with improvements) they had to build in a partitioning feature to shrink and grow partitions.
So I had a free partition. After that I downloaded ubuntu 8.10 and burned a disc.
I'm not a particular Ubuntu fan I dislike some of the things they had to change to make it more user friendly, to change some things in it the architecture is modified like the boot level system and user management. But that's an other story. Still I'm also lazy and curious so I wanted to try Ubuntu for compatibility and ease of use. I must say I'm very surprised by the installation process; when I burned the Cd I inserted it with vista running and there was a .exe on the disk. This was no surprise I have seen that before, but what I didn't see before was the install screen I got when I executed the program. I've heard about the features for installation in modern Linux but usually I don't install from windows.
Just insert Cd, wipe disk, wait a long time and answer a few questions.

This time it was different:

It asks me if I want live cd, installation as a program in windows!, or installation on the hard disk.
I want it on the disk so I choose this option. It reboots vista, and there's one of the weak points:
My laptop reboots from hard disk and I have to push a button while booting to change boot sequence. I think it was F1 or esc or del (I just pushed all tree, told you I'm lazy). After that there was the second weak point: if I would have been a starting user I wouldn't have known what to do with the partitioning screen which defaults to wipe your complete disk and not to only the empty part of the disk, as it should have in my opinion. The rest was the most pleasing surprise, it all took about 25 minutes, and EVERYTHING WORKS out of the box! Even the Sierra wireless hsdpa modem was automatically detected and the wizard even asks me which provider to use.
While installing I'm asked if I want to import settings and documents from my windows partition my documents, firefox and ie history and bookmarks. My user password and that's it, it's all too easy. I'm even considering keeping this on the laptop for a while, just to see how it feels but I'm very impressed for the moment. I'm probably going to replace it with something more basic soon, because too easy is just too easy. But I'm very happy to see there's a Linux which is really a very good windows replacement.
There's only two things left to say: there should be something in the basic install to configure compiz, I didn't find this in 2 minutes so I think it's not there, and there should be some icons on the desktop to start with.