Holy Ubuntu's Batman!

So today I sat down with my netbook, which is an EEE PC 1000 40G, and I was greeted by an upgrade notice from my operating systems update feature. It told me there was a new version of Ubuntu out that I could download and install. In a nut shell, my little PC would upgrade the whole operating system from 9.04 to 9.10.

Being of sound mind and not wanting to lose anything I backed up everything in my home directory to a USB drive and said, "Ok! Sure!" What happened next is the stuff of legends, something even Microsoft has yet to achieve in all their Windows 7 glory. The operating system downloaded all the files necessary for the upgrade and installed everything without a hitch. I didn't even have to restore from my backup, everything was just there.

Now I realize everyone has different hardware and things going on their systems but for my configuration of hardware and what I was expecting (DOOM) I was really shocked to see it go smoothly. It went better then my Windows 7 install which was easy peasy from the DVD it installed from because I didn't have to wipe the drive or anything.

After everything installed and I booted up things looked different.



I have to say it was a great experience and things look snazy and respond very nicely.

Ubuntu and the EEE PC

Today I got my EEE PC 1000 40G setup with the new version of Ubuntu EEE. As far as I can tell most of everything I want working out of the box is. I'm very happy with this because the default Asus OS that shipped with my EEE was broken all to hell and back and I did not want to run Windows. (ugh!)

So.. I did have to do some tweeking but I found out in their bug reports all the fixes I needed. First off my web cam was not responding. This was a simple fix, I just had to go in to the BIOS of my EEE and enable the camera. Apparently Asus's Xandros install ignores BIOS settings. This is bad.

The second thing was I wanted to be able to listen to my Gridstream. I used to play Anarchy Online and I do miss that game but I got addicted to WoW. I still listen to GSP though, I love the station even though I'm totally loving being a tauren druid.

Anyhow the media codecs needed to listen to GSP were not in the base install and I had to download those from the update repositories. There still was a bug in the release code that prevented the update manager from function properly. I had to go to the console and delete a bunch of files in two directories by hand. After that things just worked and downloaded and now I have music. The two directories are:

/var/lib/apt/lists
/var/lib/apt/lists/partial

NOTE: You need to keep the partial sub directory itself intact. Here's the bug report.

Oh and just take a look at the sweet Netbook Remix interface!

So yeah, I'm happy now. :)

Oooh yeah!

So last night I made the plunge and ordered a new laptop. I'm really going to enjoy the new EEE PC 1000 when it arrives. Best of all it's running Linux out of the box. 8-D