Test Drive: Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” Beta on the EEEPC

As usual, with the coming of Spring, also Ubuntu's upgrade season is coming. I so went on the 'net looking for a beta version to give a look at, just to know what to expect when the real upgrade will arrive.

No beta version?

I was a bit startled to learn that beta versions has been released only for derivative distributions while, under new distribution policies, main Ubuntu only goes through a “freeze” period of bug-fixing. I had so to download a “daily-built” version to make my bootable USB disk.

First impressions

Here is the new Ubuntu first screen-shot

apart from some slight graphic change there aren't many changes at a first glance, anyway the new Unity is still fluid and responsive even on my good-old EEEPC 900.

The most interesting novelty, at least from my point of view, is the upgrade of Libre Office to version 4.0.

I'll give a look at Libre Office new features as soon as I can.

Stability

I admit I wasn't, of course, expecting much on the stability side from a daily-built distribution but Raring Ringtail behaved reasonably well during my brief test. I only experienced some temporary freeze a couple of times. At first I also had many errors while booting from the USB disk, mostly low disk space messages. But I suppose they where mainly caused from the disk preparation process. After preparing another USB disk using Ubuntu's start-up disk creation tool, instead of Unetbootin I used first, the EEEPC could boot without any problems.