"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Friday 20 March 2015

Test Drive: Xfce (Xubuntu) on the EEEPC 900

As promised in previous post I continued in my touring about testing lightweight desktop environments on the EEEPC. This time I installed on my netbook the most famous lightweight desktop: Xfce.
I've been using Xfce for many years on my, now dismissed, old Sempron 2400 desktop computer. I never worked with it on the EEEPC. At the time the EEEPC was my “fastest” computer and Gnome used to work fine enough on it.

Installation and first impressions

I installed Xfce from shell by simply typing:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
After the installation process competed I logged off from the Gnome-Shell session and logged back in after selecting Xfce (Xubuntu Session) as desktop environment.
Here is the Xfce just after logging in:

Thursday 12 March 2015

Test Drive: Ubuntu-Gnome 15.04 (Beta 1) on the EEEPC 900

As my hardware is getting old I start living the usual “Upgrade season” with more anxiety than eagerness. The question “Will the computer still work with the new release” becomes every year more fundamental and eventually I enter in a sort of “No-news-good-news” spirit where shorter new features list are welcomed while every novelty is looked with suspicious.
So I downloaded the newly released Ubuntu-Gnome 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) in order to test it on my old netbook mostly to see if it would continue working properly after being upgraded.

The test

I booted the EEEPC from my USB disk and, after a quite short boot time, I've been taken to the usual “Install or Try it” welcome screen: