Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.10

With my recent acquisition of a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012, I immediately wanted to try out a branch of Ubuntu that I’ve up to this point completely ignored: the Netbook Remix. It’s more than just a stripped-down version of Ubuntu; there’s an entirely new interface attached to it called Unity. I was curious how it would compare to the Windows 7 Starter that came on my Dell . I hoped it would be better.

Live USB Stick

I pulled out a spare 2GB USB stick, installed the disc image, and booted my Dell Mini. F12 let me choose the boot options and select USB, and I was good to go. The system booted rather quickly, and I decided to play with the live trial first.

I clicked the “Try Ubuntu-Netbook” button and waited. And waited. And waited some more. I got a fun error message that said “failed due to unknown userid (0) then my screen popped up with the Unity desktop. My screen brightness was turned down a bit, and I figured it was because I was running the Dell on battery. The brightness keys worked fine, and I could see wireless networks.

I’d read that the Broadcom chip in the Mini 1012 had given people grief with previous versions of UNR, so I endeavoured to make that my first test. As soon as I saw the desktop I attempted to connect to a wireless access point. I had no trouble at all, and was surfing in no more time than on the Windows 7 side.

Just for fun, I clicked on the Cheese webcam app and found my camera worked as expected. I tried using OpenOffice Writer, which opened relatively quickly and performed without any stutter or visible slowdown. As I ran through the interface for UNR, I found it quite easy and pleasant to use. The screens were polished and the scrolling dock along the left side worked quite well.

Dual-Boot Install

In the short time I used UNR I wasn’t able to determine what kind of battery drain it was. I decided to throw caution to the wind and go ahead with a dual-boot install. I plugged in the netbook and crossed my fingers. There was an option to install alongside, which I took. It offered to split my 250GB harddrive down the middle, and I said OK.

The little Ubuntu whirligig cursor did its thing for some time while it resized my existing NTFS partition. Soon I saw the little orange progress bar along the bottom and I was asked to set my time zone, username, and password.

The install slide show isn’t any different than regular Ubuntu 10.10, which I guess doesn’t matter. As I mentioned before, UNR isn’t a nerfed version of the flagship OS, it’s the same OS with UI enhancements to make it easier to use on small devices.

I didn’t notice a big difference in install times between the full CD of Ubuntu 10.10 and the USB stick of UNR. It took me 33 seconds from boot to login screen in UNR, which exactly matched my boot time in Windows 7 Starter. So far it was a wash.

My sound worked, as was evidenced by the little noises the Mini made when I mistyped my password… twice. I connected to wifi and downloaded some updates. Everything felt nice and snappy. Then the hamster fell off the wheel. I got an error extracting one of the updates, which led to an error in “libc6”, which told me to F my apt-get from the terminal. (No really, the command it wanted me to run was apt-get install -f.)

I was told I needed libc6 as a dependency. It downloaded and installed just fine. I’m curious why apt couldn’t have retrieved this on its own the first time. Oh well. I went back to the update manager and this time through everything downloaded and installed with no issue.

I rebooted after the updates and got to using UNR some more. I immediately disabled some of the processes I didn’t need (Bluetooth, Visual Assistance, Evolution calendar alerts) to conserve as much CPU and battery life as possible. All the buttons along the top of the keyboard (battery, sound, brightness) worked fine.

Just for fun, I decided to see if Ubuntu One would properly sync my music between my other laptop and the Mini. I did manage to successfully log in, but nothing happened past that. I was testing this on my work wifi, however, so I didn’t put much stock behind that. The wifi in my office is locked down pretty tight, so it’s possible UNR simply couldn’t connect to the One servers.

I still don’t know if there’s an appreciable difference in battery life between Starter and UNR, but I intend to give it a good test over the next couple of days and post back.


Conclusion

I feel pretty comfortable using Ubuntu, considering it’s my OS of choice on my main laptop. I realize most people aren’t like that, but the netbook market has sold people on the idea of devices that are just a little bit different from your usual portable computer, so maybe more folks will be willing to give it a shot.
It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing with that random dependency error, but once that was taken care of I didn’t have any other hiccups to speak of. Overall I think I enjoy the interface of UNR more than Starter, if for no other reason than it’s something different.

I intend to continue playing with both Ubuntu Netbook Remix and the included Windows 7 Starter for a while before I decide which one I prefer. The relative freedom and spiffy interface of UNR is certainly poised to win me over at this point. I also like the idea of having a full-featured (and free-of-charge) office suite at my disposal rather than just WordPad to do my writing. Only time will tell. I’ll post back if anything particularly monumental happens over the next month or so.


Addendum (10/29/10)

I’m going to tack this on to the main article because I think it’s especially useful. A reader named Stunts suggested I install a program called Jupiter to handle the enabling/disabling of WIFI and Bluetooth that doesn’t seem to work out of the box on UNR.

I just wanted to thank Stunts for that excellent suggestion. The program isn’t available in the official repositories, but the DEB file I downloaded runs fine, and I confirmed with rfkill list that it does indeed disable and enable the things it says it does. The battery indicator jumped considerably when I turned all the radios off. I’ll see what kinds of numbers I get in the coming weeks.

Turning off the touchpad is nice when I have my external mouse hooked up. I also took the suggestion to install powertop, which showed me a few CPU hogs I could kill (Ubuntu One was my first casualty). Hopefully with these tools I can tweak UNR to squeeze a lot less juice.