My name is Massimo, I live in Italy but my heart resides in the Philippines since 1997.
May be I should stop live-testing distribution to start doing something more useful, but as my netbook remix (10.04) installation is getting older I’m looking for a proper replacement of the user interface I’m most addicted. So I couldn’t resist not to load an SD card with the latest Kubuntu (KDE based Ubuntu version) release to give it a test on the EEEPC 900. I downloaded so Kubuntu disk image and prepared a bootable SD, as usual, with Ubuntu bootable disk creation tool.
First impressions
After boot Kubuntu starts with its “Plasma” interface and welcomes you with the application browser, here called “Search and launch”.
Among this Linux spring novelties the release of the latest Gnome desktop version has probably been the most awaited. There has been on the Internet a lot of discussing about this Gnome release and if it could have been more fit than Unity as Ubuntu’s default desktop. I know I will not add a lot of information to the whole discussion but, anyway, I couldn’t not to give a look myself to the so long awaited Gnome 3.
Download and preparation
The easiest, and cleanest, way to test a desktop environment is running it from a live distribution disk. On Gnome download page there are two distributions available: one based on openSuse , the other based on Fedora. I decided to download and test the Fedora based disk image, almost a random decision since I was interested in testing only Gnome and not the whole distribution. For some reason Ubuntu USB disk preparation tool seems not to work with non Ubuntu images. Fortunately I had Unetbootin already installed and it had no problems to prepare a bootable SD card from the downloaded image.
First impressions
After the boot (that has been quite fast indeed) Gnome 3 welcomes you with a neat empty screen
After the upgrade to Xubuntu 11.04 of my six years old desktop computer I decided to have a look how the new Unity desktop looks and works on a computer that isn’t a netbook. Since the full “3D” Unity desktop seems not to work with my old configuration (Ubuntu live disk started with the “old” gnome desktop) I decided to install and test Unity-2D.
Unity 2D
Unity-2D is a desktop environment, developed with QT, designed to offer the same Unity interface experience on lower specification computers. Installing Unity-2D desktop from Ubuntu 11.04 is almost a trivial operation, since it’s available in Ubuntu software centre, just matter of looking for the “unity-2d” package.
It happened the counter just reached the 25000 hits level … thanks again to all my visitors and readers for this result.
Ubuntu spring upgrade time continue … just a day after Ubuntu “Natty Narwhal” release also Xubuntu 11.04 has been made available. Since I already had positively tested the beta version on my desktop computer (Sempron 2400) I decided to go straight with upgrading it with the new release.
