Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) was released this week and for the first time included a specific version for netbooks.
It took a long time to download (apparently everyone is trying to get it), but once I had the image I created a bootable USB stick and then used it to boot my EeePC into the new OS.
My first impression was that it’s really slick looking. My second impression was that the remix interface was slow. The mouse moved jerkily and the eye-candy like fades and animations were sluggish. It was only the remix interface that was affected though, as once I had Firefox or any other app running, performance was fine. I found a single post on the Ubuntu forums reporting the same thing, but it could’ve been related to running from the USB stick. I did find another article that blamed it on the combination of a new version of the X Server and a new Intel driver in the distribution and finally this one that contained instructions on how to revert to a slightly earlier kernel to fix the problem.
Despite these warning signs (I like being on the cutting edge!) I took the plunge and did a full fresh install on my Eee. Since the 701 has an SSD in it, I used some of tips in this article to not create a swap partition and selected the ext2 (non-journaling) file system during partitioning for less wear-and-tear (you can find some other tweaks for running Linux on SSD drives here).
I’m happy so far! I haven’t noticed the GUI performance problems I saw when running the “live USB” version. The installer also detected my little Bluetooth dongle and I had no problems re-pairing it to my Treo (though I still need to test using that as a data connection).
Now I’ve got to put everything back the way I like it, just like when I switched from Xandros to Ubuntu EEE and then to Easy Peasy (which just had their 1.1 release). In a month or so, I’ll also upgrade my server to this new release.
Nice comments. I am sure I will abuse all of your research when I get around to testing mine. 🙂
Thanks to Brad for this link to the Ubuntu forum thread about issues with the Netbook Remix on the Eee 701 and some common solutions.
I just happened to upgrade Ubuntu on my dual booted compaq laptop to 9.04 yesterday. Sadly, my laptop has the Atheros 5007 wifi chip, which is very problematic in general for linux. I had it working with some tricks I found online, however after the 9.04 upgrade, I’ve lost wifi completely. The same tricks did not work in 9.04, so now I’m on the troubleshooting path again trying to find a workaround. I guess I could just get a USB wifi stick, but that seems like a waste since there is wifi there I just can’t get it working at the moment. I can’t wait to get it working again, I’ve been trying to use Ubuntu at home anytime I need to work on my laptop, but with no wifi I end up switching back to windows for the time being…
I’m still struggling with two issues: getting the GPRS connection to work with my Treo over Bluetooth (I’m experimenting with blueman) and printing to my Epson printer, just like last time.
I got printing to my Epson working again (I had forgotten to ‘apt-get install libstdc++5’). For tethering to my Treo, I had to give up on using blueman with network-manager. Blueman itself worked great. I could pair my device, connect to it, and it even appeared in network-manager as a mobile broadband connection:
However, despite my best efforts, I could not get network-manager to establish the GPRS connection. I finally gave up and went back to the old manual way and it works perfectly (slowly, but perfectly). Maybe someday I’ll be able to do this all through network-manager without the need for all of this manual tweaking.
I’ve now upgraded my server to Jaunty as well … nice and easy, no problems.