Linux 2009

Every year or so I give linux another go. I've spent untold hours over the last decade or so using it, and even had it as my main OS for a while back in the Redhat 6.2 days, but I've never been totally comfortable with it.

Still, variety is the spice of life, and my netbook (Lenovo S10) needed a rebuild, so I thought I'd give the new optimised Ubuntu Netbook Remix a go. This is my story.

Bonus points for being able to find the download link from the official site.

After the included Bootable USB tool on the .iso failed to display my selected ISO, I ended up using the also-referenced Unetbootin tool to copy and make bootable my USB stick. Except it didn't work. No errors reported, but it failed to boot (Command manager not found).

Trial and error led me to format my USB as Fat32 rather than NTFS, when Unetbootin still ran without error, but this time booted correctly and like a dream, up comes UNR.

I have to say the polish and attention to detail has improved leaps and bounds in the last few years, and the default display is very usable.

The bottom row of game icons is only half displayed, but you can't have everything.

Oh, and support for my wireless card isn't enabled by default, but fortunately the drivers are included, and you're prompted that they may be of use. I haven't yet been able to get them installed. The machine has either hung while restarting after applying the driver (I thought only windows had to restart after driver installs), or hung prior to the drivers being activated.

But generally, it ran well enough off the USB stick for me to blow everything away and install it on the HDD. The install went flawlessly, and is certainly a nicer experience than older distros I've tried.

I moved back to my main desk to use the wired internet connection in an attempt to get wireless drivers downloaded. USB keyboard/mouse worked perfectly. 2nd monitor was detected and configured correctly, but rendered ugly white stripes outside the inbuilt monitor res of 1024*600, and failed to respond to any mouse clicks other than a restart. After a restart the menus render perfectly, and everything is fine and dandy in monitor land.

Except apps only open on the leftmost monitor (my large one) which is good, but can't seem to be moved to the smaller monitor (note, just found unmaximise tucked away in a context menu), which also has the taskbar etc on it, so swapping windows involves a mouse trip to tiny font land on the netbook. Admittedly you could argue a netbook focussed distro may not have the nicest support for dual monitors, but then I'd think most people with a little netbook like this would plug into proper peripherals as often as possible.

Firefox runs fine, albeit it pretty slowly compared to windows. Gmail works fine, visit Youtube and get prompted to install Flash. Fair enough.

Adobe site suggests four ways of getting flash, one (.deb) marked for Ubuntu 8+, download, open with default application... apparently i don't have libnspr4-dev, whatever that is. Oh well, at least I won't get spammed with flash ads.... or youtube vids.

There's very nice, easy access to a stack of software via the Ubuntu Software Centre. Everything I've looked at so far says it's "not available in the current data", and can't be installed.

I dunno, I keep giving linux it's chance, to the point where a fairly pro-linux flatmate of mine throw up his hands trying to get a distro to work on my old cobbled together PC. But I'd really hoped that on stock hardware, with a a targeted release things would be better than this by now. I want linux to be fantastic, I want to have another option than Windows, but I can't see this install lasting any longer than a week.

It's just not ready yet.