Pleasant Surprises with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Release Candidate

I've had a couple of very pleasant surprises with the Netbook Remix of the Lucid Release Candidate this weeend. First, I was going to load the full version on my beloved little HP 2133 Mini-Note, but I realized that I only had the 64-bit full version, and the 32-bit Netbook Remix. So I thought what the heck, I'll give it a try. When I've loaded it before on the 2133 it was painfully slow to use, because of the limited Chrome9 video driver. This time, though, I could see as soon as I booted the Live USB that it was a lot better. It loaded without any trouble at all, and runs very nicely, with none of the awful 5-10 second delay as icons changed that it had before. I don't honestly know if they have improved the Chrome driver, as the ATI and nVidia drivers have been, or if they have just made the UNR user interface work better with lower performance graphic drivers. Whichever it is, it's really nice. Everything seems to work, the only "special" thing I had to do was choose a driver for the Broadcom wireless adapter, and then that came right up as well. Even the built-in camera seems to work (with cheese). This was on my WXGA (1280x768) model, I'm anxious to try it now on the SVGA (1024x600) model, but that one is out on loan right now.

No sooner did I get that one finished, than my friend who has an original Asus Eee PC 701 came by and said she didn't need it any more. I was so pleased with my success on the 2133 that I decided to give the latest UNR a shot on that as well. It couldn't have been easier - boot the Live USB thumb driver, run through the load procedure, and it's working like a charm. I know there are Eee-oriented distributions available, but for simplicity and compatibility with Ubuntu/UNR on other systems, this is just great. Once again, everything works - wireless networking, audio, camera, all no problems.

Isn't it nice when things go well? What a nice weekend!

jw 25/4/2010