Thursday, April 29, 2010

Ubuntu Netbook Edition

My laptop is a Lenovo X60s -- a 12" subcompact that four years ago was pretty l33t. It still works fine, and I'm hoping that by the time it croaks I'll be able to get the same performance and much better battery life from a netbook at about one tenth the Lenovo's original price.

Anyhow, when I upgraded to the new Ubuntu Lucid release I switched to the Netbook Edition. I'm happy with the switch, since I've taken to spending most of my time with Chrome taking up the whole screen anyhow, and I'm looking forward to the planned changes going forward for Maverick. I'm becoming extremely intolerant of interfaces that waste vertical space in small screens for an endless stack of bars and panels.

Also, if you want to make a bootable usb stick for installation, you want to use usb-creator on Ubuntu. The download site points you to usb-imagewriter which didn't actually create anything bootable for me.

2 comments:

Graham Wegner said...

I put the Netbook Remix on my ten year old son's new Aspire One netbook and I really like the way it runs. My gripe about using netbooks at the primary school where I work is how XP miniaturises everything on the small screen, but with Netbook Remix it is easy to forget that I'm only using a 10 inch screen. For my son's use, Ubuntu makes it easy to get rid of the unnecessary software crud that plagues any Windows set up.

Unknown said...

I'm getting ready to upgrade my desktop to Kubuntu 10.04! Making some upgrades first...