Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 5 - netbook friendly

As you will be aware I work on the eeebuntu distro which is linked very closely to the Ubuntu distro, as that is what it is built upon.

So part of our work is to look at what is coming down the pipe in their next release to see how we can build on that and make it and even better experience for our users.

Until recently, Ubuntu has not been that friendly out of the iso towards some of the hardware we support, to such an extent we have had to replace the kernel and modify settings etc to make the whole experience more user friendly.

It has been stated that Ubuntu will be making efforts to make the next release more netbook friendly and on first impressions of this release they have certain made steps forward.

I am testing it on an Eeepc 1000, with 2GB of RAM and using a Kingston 2GB USB pen drive to run it from. The performance from the USB drive is very acceptable, and the hardware detection of the important netbook components was perfect. I'm posting this from that environment, so it is proof that the wifi card has been detected. I had problems with the previous version with 1000's mouse pad and two finger scrolling, both of these haave been fixed.

They have also disabled the CTRL-ALT backspace key combination to stop neew users reseting their X sessions by mistake, a good move in my opinion. They have also implemented the new notification system, which looks very impressive ,and hopefully this can be built upon for other uses. The new kernel 2.6.28, has obviously been compiled with many of the netbook requirements built in, so this makes testing it far easier.

I would definitely recommend installing it onto a USB drive and taking it for a spin to see what you think. The more eyes looking at the early builds, the more bugs can be found , and the better the final release will be.

Jaunty 9.04 Alpha