Ubuntu on Ultranote II

Yesterday I took delivery of my Ultranote II and thought I would share my experiences so far.

I installed Unbuntu 14.04 LTS and basically everything has gone very smoothly (at least after I realised that just downloading the .iso file onto a USB stick doesn't turn it in to a boot drive:whistling. So far everything is running smootly. Wirelss, bluetooth, card reader, touchpad. I haven't been able to watch a DVD yet but I think that is more something to do with the viewer rather than not having the driver as it reads the files on the disc fine.

I am a complete novice on this sort of thing and I still have a lot to learn but I am impressed with how easy the start has been. Many thanks to Stephen M and the reassurance he gave me while I was chosing the spec.

If it is of any help thehe spec I chose are as follows:

Chassis & Display
UltraNote: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Backlit Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4712MQ (2.30GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
INTEL® HD GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR 4600
Memory - Hard Disk
500GB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
mSATA/M.2 SSD Drive
240GB INTEL® 530 mSATA 6Gb/s SSD (upto 540MB/sR | 480MB/sW)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
UltraNote Series: 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Memory Card Reader
Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N-7260 HMC (300Mbps, 802.11BGN) + BLUETOOTH

Thanks for the thanks. What media player are you using, I like VLC, that is pretty good for most video and audio codecs.

VLC plays DVDs fine, so you should install that. But it may be that you need to install the DVD codecs also (ubuntu-restricted-extras or these: libdvdcss libdvdread4 libdvdnav4).
See here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/505684/vlc-wont-play-dvd-movies

Thanks T-dome. All sorted now. I was begining to get a bit annoyed as the instructions in your link didn't work. Until I realised I hadn't followed them entirely. One removal and reinstall later and I can now watch dvds.

Next step to try a few other distros.

You can try Linux Mint - it should have codecs preinstalled. It comes with 2 major desktops - Cinnamon and KDE.