My name is Massimo, I live in Italy but my heart resides in the Philippines since 1997.
Since I heard that the new Ubuntu release would be based only on Gnome3 and Unity (the older release was a plain Gnome 2 version on “non-3D-capable” computers) I wondered how it would perform on older computers. So the second step of my “Test Drive”s has been to test Ubuntu 11.10 on my “still-alive” five years old Sempron 2400.
Boot _ errors _ and boot again
Ubuntu 11.10 beta is definitively a buggy beta, I already realized this while testing on the EEEPC but on the Sempron 2400 it looks even more buggy. I had to restart the boot process three times before arriving to Unity 2D main screen.
apart from these boot errors and some error message now and then, that also appeared on the EEEPC, the system did run smoothly enough.
Ubuntu’s update season is coming again, with it’s usual load of discussing (especially about the famous “disappearing” menus). As every season I started my tour of live version testing with the hope this new release will mature enough to convince me to leave the old 10.04 (LTS) I still have on my EEEPC. So I downloaded the new Ubuntu disk image and prepared a bootable USB drive using, as usual, the tool Ubuntu itself provide.
First impressions
Here is how Ubuntu 11.10 looks like
Mono, like many of you certainly know, is the Open source development framework compatible with Microsoft’s .NET. I usually work with Java and know almost nothing about .NET or Mono, I so decided to install Mono and it’s integrated development environment Mono-develop on the EEEPC to give it a look.
Why mono?
Is not a secret that the use of Mono is widely criticized in some Linux environments mainly because the risk of having to deal with Microsoft’s software patents … Software patents risk mustn’t be underestimated but, on the other hand, I think that a programmer shouldn’t ignore a widely used framework like .NET and Mono is a cheap way to learn about it.
Installation and first project
Installing Mono is a quite trivial task: just matter of looking for it in the Ubuntu software centre. To develop applications with graphic user interface GTK# libraries must be also be installed.
