I’ve been using Ubuntu 8.10 with a few hacks quite happily on my Asus Eee PC 701. Ubuntu 9.04 has just come out, and included in the announcement was a note that a special Netbook Remix is available.

So, being a glutton for punishment, I decided to wipe everything off the Eee and put in a clean copy of 9.04 Netbook Remix. My /home directory is held separately, encrypted with Truecrypt, so I thought it wouldn’t be affected by the upgrade.

The install went very smoothly, expect for the encrypted home drive. It looks as though the pam_mount and Truecrypt developers have been unable to agree on how to pass command lines from pam_mount to Truecrypt (really!), so the pam_mount guys have dropped support for Truecrypt. Anyway, I eventually hacked round that and reported it as a bug to the Truecrypt guys. No reply as yet.

So what do I think of the Remix? I’m sorry to say that on the Eee PC 701, it’s unusably slow. It seems bizarre that the Remix team have got so carried away with the eye candy that they’ve lost sight of performance.  A clear case of the plot being lost… the only option was to switch to the Classic Desktop, and everything was fine. Ho hum.

Apart from that, how compatible is the Remix? Not bad:

I haven’t been able to get Skype to work, which is annoying, and I’m not sure what the effect will be on battery life of not being able to switch off the WiFi when I’m not using it. The battery monitor suggests battery life will be good at a couple of hours – I haven’t been able to test this yet.

So, there’s some way to go, but it’s not bad for an ‘out of the box’ offering.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.