Remixing things up

[captpackrat]

When I bought my Dell Mini 9 netbook, it came with Dell's version of Ubuntu, which was majorly broken. I replaced the dinkey 16 Gig SSD that was the largest drive they offered with a cheap (relatively) 64 Gig SSD and installed the full version of Ubuntu. It was slower than the custom Dell version, but it worked correctly. I upgraded it a couple times until it was at 9.04. 9.10 came out recently, but rather than doing a simple upgrade, I decided to start from scratch and do things right. I wiped the SSD and installed the Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu.

Only to find out there's a lot of stuff broken in it off the bat. The wireless didn't work at all and took a lot of Googling to fix. Getting it to see my Bluetooth mouse was much more difficult than it should have been. And then there's the interface. Ugh! By default, Netbook Remix uses a special Launcher application instead of the usual menu system. I'm not 5 years old, I don't need a screen full of icons the size of golf balls. Getting rid of the Launcher wasn't easy. Googling didn't help much, the "desktop-switcher" program I kept reading about wasn't anywhere to be found in Synaptic. I finally figured out that I could disable to Launcher in Startup Applications, then add the Main Menu to the menu bar. There's no easy method to switch back and forth between the normal Ubuntu interface and the toddler-friendly Netbook interface.

Now I just need to reinstall all my usual software, install and configure all my Firefox extensions, set up my e-mail and IM accounts, copy over all my files....

Comments

[nipper.livejournal.com]

If you don't like the Netbook Remix interface, why not just reinstall normal Ubuntu?

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

The Netbook Remix version is supposedly optimized for netbooks. It does seem a bit faster, but that could also be the difference between Koala and Jackalope, or because I set it up with swap space this time around and I used ext4 which is supposed to be better for SSDs.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

Now I just need to reinstall all my usual software
What better way to spend your weekend? :o) The nice man at Technical Services sent me a ghost disc to speed my little project along at work today.

From the Ubidoobie webpage: Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.
Ecosystem?? I'm behind on my technobabble.