The new release of Ubuntu is 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope. A Jackalope for those wondering is a mythical beast, a jack rabbit with the horns of an antelope.
I installed it from the Alternate CD using a USB cdrom drive (the desktop liveCD would also work fine I think). Basically this worked fine and the screen sort of worked. It correctly set the resolution to 1024×600, however it then set the scale of the panel incorrectly and stretched the 1024×600 image out to 1280×1024, thus you can only see the top left portion of the screen. This flummoxed me for quite a while during the beta phase, but with some help from the OpenChrome developers I got it sussed. The OpenChrome driver by default gets a number representing the panel size from the bios and looks this up in a little table of possible resolutions. It gets the number 7 from the bios, and this corresponds to 1280×1024. Either the Bios is wrong or the table is wrong, for what its worth I would bet on the table being right.
Anyhow, a little tweak to the xorg.conf and all is well. Here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf in full:
Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
Driver “openchrome”
option “PanelSize” “1024×600″
EndSection
so we just give the driver a little hint as to the correct panel size and it is up and running. There is no 3d in the OpenChrome drivers so no Compiz, but at least it works. With that and the latest Wader mobile broadband client (the release today seems to work pretty well) then it all seems to work nicely, it now includes SMS handling, transfer statistics and a warning when you go past a transfer limit you can set.
I won’t be doing much more here, but do keep an eye on http://planet.ubuntu-uk.org and on irc (which you can get to in pidgin) feel free to drop in on the #ubuntu-uk channel http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/IRC