The Nvidia (it’s an Optimus laptop) doesn’t work reliably well at all, however.

I fear the default drivers or the intel graphics card are not enough to run gnome 3 in full glory…

I haven’t tried the newer versions, since I’ve switched to Fedora.

Also, I’m about a day away from ordering a non-dell replacement for the Adamo. Since I bought it, it’s killed a dozen AC adapters and replacing both them and the motherboard have not resolved the issue.

Can you share what you were doing as well as what settings you used. For example: lowest brightness setting, no wifi, etc…

I used to run without a swap partition as well on a 2G laptop, eventually I find a way to use it, and things get ugly.

Really, thought, it boils down to this: if you could have 24G of memory in your laptop, you’ve basically ensured that you’ll be set for the lifetime of the machine. With an SSD drive, that’s basically what you get (with some caveats), so why not?

Perhaps you are doing something non-obvious, but isn’t that excessive to the point of ridiculous.

- Edward -

Ubuntu aparently requires your /boot par­ti­tion be un-encrypted

How could an encrypted /boot possibly work? The code that does the decryption (kernel and initrd, i.e. the stuff that’s kept in /boot) and anything that runs before it (i.e. GRUB stage 2, also kept in /boot) needs to be unencrypted, or you’ll have serious chicken and egg problems

http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2008/09/cryptroot/ has a similar description of how I do encrypted-root on LVM under Debian (IIRC the Ubuntu alternate installer is just debian-installer, so it should be the same process in Ubuntu). I think we’re using a slightly different stacking order (I use the partition as one big encrypted blob and set up LVM inside it, which gives you one less encryption key to worry about); I avoid the problem you described by having a third partition for /boot (which you should hopefully never need to resize, so it doesn’t need to be LVM’d).