Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix REVIEW – Mixed Impressions
I’ve always been a huge fan of Ubuntu due to their ease of use and virus-free environment. When we came to know that the Canonical has unveiled a special netbook edition specially tailored for the netbooks, I could not stop myself installing the it on my EEE.
Installation
The installation was pretty much seamless.
- First download the image file from the ubuntu’s servers
- Download Disk Imager from here
- Use the Disk Imager to ‘write’ the image file to your flash drive (should be atleast 1GB)
One much required improvement over the previous installations was the fact that the dialog boxes and windows were fully visible. You no longer have to do the ‘ctrl+f7′ key combo to move the windows around just to click on ‘Proceed’.
One thing to note is that although Ubuntu suggests that you install netbook edition on an Atom processor, but the installation also worked fine on an EEE 701 running Celeron processor.
Boot Time
Since the video speaks (and show) more than pictures and words, here is the video of EEE 1000HE booting the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. It takes just 24 seconds to fully boot up. Earlier versionns like Ubuntu 8.10 used to take nearly 1 minute to fully boot up.
Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Edition booting on an EEE 1000HE from Kamal DS on Vimeo.
Web Experience
Since it is called netbook edition, it should provide great web experience to the user, right? Ubuntu 9.04 comes with the excellent Firefox browser. The browsing speeds have improved by miles when compared to previous versions.
But, flash player has not been included! What were the folks at ubuntu thinking? Flash is widely used everywhere on web. You will see ‘install missing plugins’ bar on the top of the webpage, which uses flash anywhere in the website. Clicking that bar will display the list of plugins required to play flash. I tried all of them and firefox was unable to install any of them. This called for manual installation, something which would be little difficult for the normal user.
How can it say "installed" when it was not able to find the plugin?
Anyway, these are the steps to install flash player:
- Go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
- Save it to Desktop
- Click on the ‘deb’ file to start the installation
- Restart the browser and the flash should now work fine
For Instant Messaging, it comes with rock solid application called Pidgin, which supports a wide variety of IM services.
Applications
The Ubuntu 9.04 Nebtook Remix comes with an array of applications. Here is the screenshot of the netbook remix launcher.
It also comes with Openoffice suit and I did notice that it opened more quickly than the previous versions, which is nice to hear.
So, how much space does it takes?
It takes nearly 2GB. It should easily fit in an EEE 701 and you will still have ~1.8GB space for applications.
What was annoying?
Other than the lack of flash support, there were few other annoying problems too. The speaker volume was set half way. I spent nearly an hour figuring out what could be the reason about such low sound volume. Later on, I saw that you must click on small speaker icon and then adjust the volume from there. See the following screenshot:
After that, I wanted to try out its multimedia capabilities. The movie player application started and alerted me that there are no MP3 codecs. How could folks at ubuntu forget to bundle the MP3 codec? Anyway, the problem was quickly resolved as it itself prompted me to download the codecs.
Pros:
- It is FREE
- FREE support
- Boots faster
- Apps launch faster
- Basic apps like web browser, email-client and office suit already bundled
- Easily download hundreds of apps via package manager
Cons:
- No codecs in movie player to play even basic stuff like MP3
[Download Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix]
update from folks at Ubuntu:
We cannot ship codecs as they cost money. You can but them in the Canonical store. We cannot ship Flash as it is not open source software. You can choose to install it from the repos or go to Adobe. We did not overlook these items.
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You are right about the lack of codecs, but I downloading them was not difficult at all.
Windows SUCK! UBUNTU FTW!
Been using ubuntu from past few days and you are right about its improved boot up speed.
Oh and lack of flash plugin was very annoying. I followed ur instructions and now flash works!
Thanks a ton
lack of codecs is due to licensing issues with proprietary formats such as flash and mp3. Yes, companies own them (adobe and fraunhofer institute respectively), they might appear to be free for the end user, but that does not make them free (as in freedom or beer). Lack of codecs has been a long debate in linuxland. It’s not a short coming, per se, you just need to know what you are dealing with.
To download flash and all the codecs you want, just need to install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package in synaptic, that has flash and all the other codecs you want. For dvd playback you must setup the medibuntu respository, look for it on google and follow the install how-to. That will get you skype, google earth and adobe reader as well. Most linux distros have this problem but some don’t such as pcoslinux, or the ubuntu that comes bundled with the dell computers.
That’s fine, but medibuntu will take up a lot of place on a 701′s 4GB disc. I could do without google earth and adobe reader on a netbook, but skype makes sense (since you can call ordinary phones, i e calling home and talk to your kids when travelling abroad). However, it seems that ubuntu netbook remix simply can’t get the microphones running. Ideas about that, anyone, please.
For the internal mic to work you have to download the latest version of the Alsa driver from http://www.alsa-project.org, get alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils and compile them the usual way . It did work very well on my AAOD150 and Skype now works very well. Good luck.
“he speaker volume was set half way. I spent nearly an hour figuring out what could be the reason about such low sound volume. Later on, I saw that you must click on small speaker icon and then adjust the volume from there.”
Omg you are a complete idiot… it took you an hour to figure out how to turn the volume up….. shame on ubuntu… they should really do something to alert people how to adjust the volume on their o.s……
I actually thought ubuntu was idiot friendly until i came across you.
Kaddy, I should suggest you to do the research first. It turns out that Ubuntu resets the volume to 50% everytime you boot into Ubuntu 9.04. Using the hot keys do not change the master volume.
and it STILL took you a couple of hours to figure out that you should look at the volume control manager. LOL. your still pathetic
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You say it lacks flash drivers like that’s a BAD thing. ;)
Personally, the first thing I do in Firefox is install Adblocker and Flashblocker. I don’t want to download unnecessary flash crap that just annoys the crap out of me. However, I do school work and such on my netbook. I don’t use it for surfing the net much, unless I’m looking up scholastic articles and research. That has very little flash involved. As always, to each their own, and my personal scenario is probably not typical.
I don’t have much experience on linux .When I try to install flash player on ubuntu remix the package installer prints the following error : ” Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libnspr4-dev” .Can anyone help?I also can’t install codecs for the media player because it always shows similar messages.If anyone could help I would be grateful.
How are you trying to install it? Via terminal or by package manager?
I found it easier to go from one ubuntu version to the other as far as codecs are concerend visa vie the synaptic package managers load list option hence installing games and alike automatically as well as saving programs such as adobe reader and alike on a disk for future use and saving the sources list file and the key ring location.
my only questions are
cdma modems such as the tricky cricket usb and doing the above mentioned are these options and issues going to be addressed in any review? it may aid in the want to switch for anyone