Happy Easter

I'd just like to say to all my readers ...

HAPPY EASTER!

Test drive: Ubuntu (and Xubuntu) 11.04 beta on the Sempron 2400

 

While waiting for the Ubuntu stable release I continued trying live beta versions on my computers. This time I put the downloaded ISO images on a USB drive in order to test them on my old desktop computer (a Sempron 2400). Live CD editions combined with USB drives give us an extremely powerful and inexpensive way to have a reasonable preview of how a new release or distribution will behave on our system.

Ubuntu 11.04

I used the same disk image I previously used to test Ubuntu on my EEEPC. Once launched the system started with a standard Gnome desktop. It seems that my system configuration is not supported by Unity. May be Unity 2D version will work even on my old configuration, I didn't test it. I'm still not a big fan of Unity so … I don't miss it very much.

The system runs fine. The most visible difference is probably the menu bar stuck, by default, on the top-left side of the screen. A solution that can save some pixel on smaller screens but definitively pointless, if not annoying, at higher resolutions.

Test drive: Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” Beta on the EEEPC 900

Again, with the coming of spring, also Ubuntu upgrade season is arriving. Last upgrade season left me quite unhappy since the new Ubuntu user interface “Unity”, released with the netbook edition performed very poorly on my EEEPC. Now the new release has reached the beta stage and I decided to try it, in live mode, to see if any improvements have been made.

Download and install

As it has been previously announced by the news there isn't any more a Ubuntu “Netbook edition” (even if somebody may think that only the netbook edition has been made available this time) I so downloaded the standard Ubuntu 32 bit ISO file from here and prepared a bootable SD card as usual with the utility available in Ubuntu.

First impressions

Here is how the new release looks like: