Lazyweb: where’s my Ubuntu laptop configurator?
The official Hardy Heron release has been out for a few days and I’m finally getting around to upping my systems. But sitting here meditating to the install status bar has got me thinking…
I have quite a few laptops I maintain, and every time I do a fresh Ubuntu install on one of them — or any laptop for that matter — I’m dreading the configuration runaround that is sure to follow an otherwise painless process. The worst part is taht it’s always little things, tweaks on the base install to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of any given model. The Laptop Testing Team keeps a pretty extensive wiki, but it’s a little inconistent and cluttered.
I can’t even imagine the man hours that go into doing the same things over and over. I wonder what it would take to take the work of the Laptop Testing Team a step further, and make available a simple configurator script for every model. So only once does someone have to figure out how to configure X for projector output, or for portrait orientation for tablets — among many other tablet-specific issues that also need to be addressed on a per-model basis. I know there are dozens who’ve wrangled all these issues for every laptop I own — why are we all doing the same thing over and over?