Test Drive: Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” on the EEEPC

Ubuntu's upgrade season at last arrived. I must say I haven't paid a lot of attention, this time, to the new release (I even missed the beta release date) and to the endless discussions that usually follow any new version. By the way I downloaded Ubuntu and prepared my old 1GB flash drive in order to give it at least a look.

First impressions

The boot time seems good even with the increased disk image size (and my slow flash disk drive). Here is how the new release looks, just after the boot.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” (on the Veriton S661)

The upgrade season arrived at last. As soon I got enough free time, last week-end, I started the upgrade process on my desktop computer.


Doing the upgrade

At first, since the installed version was a LTS one, I had to enable notification for any new versions in the “software sources” configuration.

after that the update manager activated the “Upgrade” button

Android Development on Netbeans (and the EEEPC)

In my previous post I moved my first steps in Android development world by installing Android SDK and Eclipse IDE on my desktop computer. After successfully writing my first Android hello-world I went, almost immediately, on how to do Android development on the EEEPC 900. If it's true the desktop computer is much more suited for writing code it's the EEEPC tho one I always bring with me and I use for my experiments.

I'm a big fan of Eclipse and I use it everyday at work but, when it comes using it on a netbook, it performs very poorly. Worst of all some Eclipse configuration windows are too big to fit into the small EEEPC screen and even lack of scroll-bars. This is why I use Netbeans on the EEEPC. After a brief looking-up on the 'net I came to NBAnroid plug-in page.

Installing Netbeans to 7.2

Even if it isn't required I decided to upgrade my Netbeans installation to the latest 7.2 version. I so removed previous version by launching Netbeans removal script

sudo /usr/local/netbeans-7.1.2/uninstall.sh

then I downloaded latest Netbeans version from its download page and launched the auto-installing script

chmod +x netbeans-7.2-ml-javase-linux.sh

sudo ./netbeans-7.2-ml-javase-linux.sh

this started the usual Netbeans installation wizard 

after some “I agree” and several “Next” I got the new version installed.

Installing Android SDK

Like in my previous post I downloaded Android SDK from Google's page and extracted it on my home folder

mkdir android

mv Downloads/android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz android/
cd android/
tar -xf android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz

The many steps of an Android Hello-World

As I promised on my last post, I couldn't resist not to write at least a hello-world application on my new phone. I went so through the, a bit long, task of installing the Android developer tools and writing my first program with it. I followed, step-by-step, instructions provided from Google Android SDK how-to pages. As a start I installed on my desktop computer but, soon, I'll try installing Android SDK on the EEEPC too.

Installation

The first step I took has been, of course, installing Eclipse IDE, a quite plain install from the software centre apart from some compatibility problem with Oracle Java 7. I had to revert to OpenJDK as default JVM in order to make Eclipse start.

The second step has been downloading and extracting Google's Android SDK. I though, at the beginning, about installing on a system folder like “/opt”, until I discovered that Android's Eclipse plug-in takes care of downloading and upgrading files on the SDK folder. I so went back to installing it on my home folder since running Eclipse as root user every time you have to do an upgrade is far from being advisable. By the way installing the SDK has only matter of extracting the downloaded file:

tar -xf android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz

Then I started Eclipse and selected the “Install new software” option from the “Help” menu opening the plug-in installation form. Here I added Google plug-in update URL (with the “Add...” button) and selected all the “Developer tools” items.

New toy on the desk: LG L3 Optimus E400

I'm not easy at changing my devices, unless they stop working. This time I did sort of an exception and after only a little more of two years I decided to change my (still doing its job) Nokia 5800 XM. Android phones always attracted me, since I first heard of Google promoting this new operating system, but price kept me from buying one since now. After having a look at the (not many) low priced models available here in Genoa my choice fell on the LG L3 Optimus E400. The phones I evaluated had roughly the same features and price so, at last, had been the plain metal-black design of the LG phone that triggered my choice. I'm not usually design-driven in my choices but when design is the only difference ...

By the way the new phone does all the old phone did even if the camera quality is far from what the old Nokia had. Is not new that thin bodies and good lenses are things that hardly go well together.

I'm not going to become a mobile developer tomorrow but ... be sure I'll post some hello-world in android as soon I'll find the time.