Review: Ubuntu Netbook 10.04

Hello everybody. It is been a long time. Sorry for that.

Yesterday I made a big switch from Microsoft Windows 7 Home to Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 LTS. With the Long Term Support (LTS) version you get 3 years support on Ubuntu Desktop, and 5 years on Ubuntu Server.

In this post I want to share my experiences with Ubuntu Netbook.

I replaced Windows with Ubuntu on my Netbook. I use my netbook mainly for surfing and multi media purposes.

Due to the lack of CD-ROM, I first had to make an USB drive installation. Just download the .iso from the Ubuntu website and follow the instructions for Windows, Mac or Ubuntu how to create a USB drive. In my case, I had to download a simple Windows application that simple needed to know the distribution and location of the .iso.

The installation also contains a Try it! mode, which allowed me to run Ubuntu without touching the system. This is ideal for finding out if all hardware is supported.

All hardware on my Samsung NC10 was detected and worked out of the box. Also most of the functionality I used on Windows appeared to be part of Ubuntu Netbook default software set. The only difference is that Ubuntu required 715MB for the operating system including applications, compared to Windows that requires 3GB excluding applications.

Some applications that are installed by default:

• Firefox Web Browser
• OpenOffice.org 3.2
• Evolution Mail and Calendar
• F-Spot Photo Manager
• Gwibber Social Client
• Empathy IM Client

The few applications that were not part of the default installation that I installed additionally from the Ubuntu Software Center or developer website are:

• Google Chrome
• Adobe Flash plugin
• Touchpad
• Dropbox
• FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer

I was really surprised that all these applications were available as .deb. In the earlier days, I always has to search for repositories that held experimental sources. But apparently Ubuntu became an important Linux distribution, that software developers want to support.

With the additional software installations I am now able to do the same as with Windows, but more free space and all for free.

My experiences with Ubuntu Netbook so far are great. Fast boot time (30 sec. until desktop), nice netbook aware interface and kind for the battery. I love the Gwibber Social Client, that links to almost all social networks, including Twitter, Facebook.

Evolution Mail Client works fine. I would like to have better Gmail integration though. Mail itself is fine, but Contacts and Calendat requires some tweaking.

Sound & Video applications Rythmbox Music Player and Movie Player play all the well knows formats. The Rythmbox Music Player is by default linked to two music stores (Jamendo, Magnatune and Ubuntu One Music Store).
Something nice I discovered is the automatic playback of .mp3 as soon as you hover above a file in the Ubuntu File Browser.

Ubuntu has also a cloud service called Ubuntu One. From the default installation you can easily create an account and add the computer to the Ubuntu One cloud. All computers in the cloud can synchronize Notes, Contact, Bookmarks and Files. Unfortunately you can not yet link your Windows machines to Ubuntu One.

So far, I can really recommend Ubuntu Netbook on netbooks.

I will continue my research to see if Ubuntu can be used as stable VDI client.

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