Test drive: Ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition live (beta) on the EEEPC 900

The Ubuntu upgrade season is approaching and, as usual, I decided to give a look at the recently released beta version. I started from the netbook edition because it's the distribution that keep me more interested and, in some way, concerned.

Download, make and boot ...

Preparing a live USB disk has become an almost trivial task: I downloaded Ubuntu's ISO image from Ubuntu download page and prepared a booting SD card with the utility that Ubuntu itself provides. After few minutes (of disk preparing the download took a little longer) I've been able to restart my EEEPC and boot from the just prepared SD card.

The boot process took a little long to complete but this might be accountable to the SD card. At roughly half of the boot process the system asked if I'd liked proceed with installation or evaluating the live edition.

Upgraded to Netbeans 6.9.1 (on the EEEPC)

From time to time it happens I start dusting off the development environment on my EEEPC in order to start with some little new experiment. I so decided to upgrade Netbeans 6.8 there installed to the latest version 6.9.1.

Upgrading the JDK

As first step I decided, even if It's not strictly necessary, to upgrade to the latest JDK. I downloaded the self extracting archive from Oracle's download page and extracted it into the /opt directory:

chmod +x jdk-6u21-linux-i586.bin

mv jdk-6u21-linux-i586.bin /opt

sudo /opt/jdk-6u21-linux-i586.bin

As alternative JDK OpenJDK can be installed by a simple apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Installing Netbeans 6.9.1

I downloaded Netbeans installation file from Netbeans.org download page then I executed it:

chmod +x netbeans-6.9.1-ml-javase-linux.sh

sudo ./netbeans-6.9.1-ml-javase-linux.sh

the installation program starts and it's only matter of agreeing with licences and clicking “next”.