This morning I tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for the first time. My first impression was that it’s very polished and usable by non-geeks.
I’m not an Ubuntu user myself; I use Fedora on all my machines – including my EeePC 901. But my other half, Hana, has an EeePC 701. She’s not a geek, and she just wants something that will work for her. She’s seen XP on a 701 and agreed the 7″ screen isn’t really up to scratch.
Recently we tried gOS on the 701. It’s Ubuntu based and very friendly. It’s well laid out and easy to use. Hana used it for a couple of months and got on well with it. The main problem was that wireless never quite worked properly, and using an Ethernet cable kind of spoils the point of a tiny laptop,
So this morning I swapped gOS for UNR. The installation was painless, and first boot went without hitch. The main snag I ran into on the 701 was that the animated menus made the whole system slow down. This turned out to be a bug which was easily remedied by installing two packages.
It’s early days yet – the system has only been functional for about an hour and Hana hasn’t used it yet. I’ll post again with more comments on UNR when we’ve had a chance to play with it.
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Jonathan Gazeley 
I dont like Ubuntu, bacause i have never had it boot properly yet. However, i am willing to give it a go on my eee. What packages did you need to install to bring it up to scratch, and have you done anything to it to remove the bashing that virtual memory etc gives a flash drive?
Looking forward to a follow up post.
Love and hugs
someone who isn’t going to get eaten by friends.pl
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The Ubuntu Netbook Remix already has all the packages to “bring it up to scratch”. I haven’t done any unusual customisations yet – I think they are pretty much integrated. The one thing I did was specifically tell it not to have a swap partition.
The magic I had to do to make graphics work smoothly was the following:
used Gdebi to install the following files:
linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic_2.6.28-11.43~lp349314apw5_i386.deb
linux-image-2.6.28-11-generic_2.6.28-11.43~lp349314apw5_i386.deb
Which roughly translates as
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic linux-image-2.6.28-11-generic
Other than that, it simply worked out of the box.
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