[Hudlug] new laptop

[MICHAEL WEAVER]

I now have a new laptop.
Unfortunately I couldn't purchase a IBM thinkpad because I would have had to 
order one so I bought a Compaq instead.
Ubuntu seemed to boot from the Live CD so I presume I should be able to get 
it working although I only tried to run Openoffice which unfortunately 
wouldn't execute after my sister went through what appeared on screen 
because it asked for Java to be installed and something about Openoffice 
needing Java to run. I presume this error only appeared because it was a 
Live CD running only a temporary copy of Linux. For some reason I didn't get 
any sound on the laptop when my sister booted up the system although this 
may have been because the volume on the Laptop was turned down which was why 
we didn't try the sound stuff that the live CD came up with on this menu.
I couldn't try Mozilla because I wasn't connected to the Internet.
I presume sound should work if the volume level is set right on the machine 
and that if Lindsay could see stuff on screen like a menu of options to pick 
on the live Ubuntu CD like when it booted from the CD it came up with 
options like Open Office, Mozilla etc and tried to set up Openoffice, it 
should work with other stuff. I tried it with the Live CD because I didn't 
really want to make too many changes to my system until I had someone with 
me who might know what they are doing as Lindsay isn't a Linux user although 
if I can run Linux I will be making the system an entire Linux system so at 
the moment it does just have Windows on it until I can get it to work with 
applications and speech from the soundcard.
My sister isn't likely to understand the sudo apt-get install stuff, I 
wouldn't have been able to connect anyway and with it being a Live CD, I 
might not even have been able to download Gnopernicus if it had been 
connected to the Internet and Lindsay wouldn't have known how to get to a 
command prompt to do it which is why I have left it as is and I thought if I 
ran the live CD I burned, what happened when booting Live might give me an 
idea as to whether my laptop would support it.
Maybe one of you lot could look it over for me if there is time and make 
Ubuntu or other distro a permanent install.
It was deffinately booting from the live CD unlike my old worn out Toshiba 
laptop which wouldn't even do that because I even tried the Oralux on it and 
my learning assistant Carlos who was into Linux had tried to install Redhat 
on it and I think the Model number which I believe was TSR120 wasn't even 
mentioned on the Linuxlaptop site. It was one of those machines where you 
had to change between a CDROM drive and a floppy drive which might have 
posed a problem.