Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Thursday 15 October 2009, 3:22 PM
Ubuntu Netbook Remix - Have You Seen it Lately?
I loaded the Beta on my ASUS N10J, and I was amazed. I have not been a big fan of UNR until now, I found the desktop to be a bit, hmmm, I can't quite think of the right description - clunky, unrefined, very much in-your-face, I suppose in an attempt to make it "obvious". It was vastly superior to the Moblin desktop if your purpose with the netbook was anything other than "Social Networking", but I still didn't care for it for my own daily use. The new desktop is much nicer, it seems smoother and I actually find it much more obvious to use than the previous version simply because you don't have everything "shouting at you" from the desktop.
jw 15/10/2009
PreviousComments on this post
I did try it on my acer aspire one, but I actually prefer a blank desktop which I can clutter up! I've ended up using GNOME Do http://bit.ly/2bWwwG which IMHO is ideally suited to fiddly netbook trackpads (ie don't use them!!)
Jake - I agree, and I think the cluttered desktop is a large part of what I was saying about it was "in-your-face". Although the new release that I have loaded looks much simpler and less cluttered, it still isn't a plain old desktop background that you can modify (and clutter up) as you please. However, I think that I would feel a lot better about putting this version onto a netbook that I was going to give to a non-technical friend than I did with the older version. In fact, I'm likely to find out pretty soon, because when I set up the HP Mini 2140 for one of my friends, there was a problem with the linux kernel getting confused by the Atom CPU, and I had to disable something in the BIOS setup. That should be fixed in the much newer kernel that comes with Karmic, so I'm planning to get the 2140 back from her and upgrading it once the Karmic final release comes out.
Thanks for reading and commenting, as always.
jw
Agree: I loaded the Remix on a Lenovo S10e netbook and it's just too cluttered for me but would work well for someone not accustomed to tinkering....
Pity that there still aren't Linux drivers for the Lenovo's Broadcom Wifi subsystem that would allow it to access access points using 802.11g channels 12 or 13 -- so often uncluttered with noise -- when Windows on the same machine does so with ease.
> so I'm planning to get the 2140 back from her and upgrading it once the Karmic final release comes out.
So is the netbook remix released at the same time as the distro? If so, that would be interesting that ubuntu are placing the emphasis on netbooks (talking of which I saw the ZDNet article about the Acer running Android and booting up in 18 seconds :)
I believe that UNR will be released at the same time as the standard distribution, because that is the way it happened with Jaunty, and it has happened with the Alpha and Beta releases. We'll know for sure in a few weeks.
I saw that boot time too, and was very impressed.
jw
