Migrating to a Netbook and Ubuntu 9.04
Last week my wife’s Acer Aspire One came back from repair and since we bought her a new laptop I inherited it for my one use. Since I have been tossing around the idea of finally migrating to Linux for personal use I took this opportunity to do so.
I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to do the Ubuntu install and that most functions worked out of the box.
Before starting the install I did a test run of a persistent Ubuntu 9.04 install from USB (available from pendrivelinux.com). This gave me an opportunity to validate that some of the historic “pain points”, in particular, the display, wireless, and audio would work. After a couple minutes of testing I was able to confirm that all functions were substantially working. From there I simply rebooted the laptop to run the install to my hard drive from the USB drive.
Upon completing the install there were only two areas that needed to addressed, both of which were minor, the LED for the wireless was not working and the sound/mic wasn’t working. To address the LED issues I just loaded linux-backports-modules-jaunty and to get the sound/mic to work I changed the sound devices in System|Preferance|Sound|Sound Capture both of which were detailed on the Ubuntu help site.
Following the install I am impressed with the performance, even on the lower end 1.6GHz Intel Atom and 1Gb of RAM. I have enabled the enhanced graphics themes and don’t notice any performance issues that would imply a sluggish graphics card.
As was the case with the prior version (Ubuntu 8.10) it is extremely easy to install software thought both the “Add/Remove Programs” and the Synaptic Manager so you can quickly get your productivity applications functional.
After the first week of running the new OS and going fully Open Source I have been pleased with the experiment and don’t plan to go back to Windows on that hardware any time soon.
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