Friday, April 24, 2009

Ubuntu it is...

I guess I have finally given in to the temptation to use Linux as the primary operating system on the laptop. I made the switch to Ubuntu about a month ago and the fact that I'm still using it is proof that I'm liking it (loving it might be more "apt" :D ). Here are a few screenshots...

The desktop

The best part... it is light on memory and quick to respond...

New theme... and MonoDevelop 2.0

Eye candy!

For those interested in the technical details - I'm running this on a Lenovo 3000 Y500 laptop with 2 GB of RAM and 160 GB HDD. The install was smooth and configuring the system was cakewalk. The only glitch was with getting the keyboard to work once the OS booted. Did a quick search and I found a solution on the ubuntu forums.
For the ones with a keen eye - you would see that I am running without any swap space, and still no issues as yet... I'll run some heavy stuff to test it out...

I think I might go in for the upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu (9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope) tomorrow...

For folks who are interested in trying it out here is the download link. I will be following up with more posts on my experiments and experiences with Ubuntu...

Stay tuned!

Edit: Removed one image... (25th April, 2009)
Edit: Added two images (9th May, 2009)

3 comments:

Sreejesh Muyyam said...

Wow......thatz nice one to know..hope it will click

Valhallen said...

Hey how's jaunty doing for you i was running the same on a toshiba with a 1.5Mobo celeron, 256 shared RAM and a 40 GB PATA. was darned slow and my graphics were sadly broken. which did you use the one with KDE/GNOME/XFCE or one of the smaller box packages?

Unknown said...

@Valahallen - Jaunty is doing amazingly fine. Given that my earlier experience with Linux on a personal computer was not very fruitful. As far as your issues with graphics are concerned, have you enabled restricted drivers? I am using Gnome. I did try out KDE but reverted to Gnome (more on that below).

All the machines that I have used (with Ubuntu) had Nvidia graphics and that requires the use of restricted drivers on ubuntu to make full use of graphics.
Without the restricted drivers, the UI was laggy and very slow.

Coming to my experience with jaunty, tt has been extremely smooth sailing from the word go. However I haven't been using it for a couple of months now. I have been using instead a HP Pavilion DV4t, 4GB RAM, 320 GB SATA HDD, 512 MB NVidia Graphics, integrated webcam and fingerprint reader.

Now this little beauty runs smooth with jaunty. No issues whatsoever. I have also been fiddling around with 9.04 64 bit version on AMD.

I installed KDE on the HP DV4t and used the oxygen theme. I should say that I loved it. However the wireless networking was not working on KDE and I haven't yet done any troubleshooting (read as "haven't yet checked any forums") for solving the problem. So as of now it is Gnome (with the Oxygen theme ported to Gnome, couldn't resist it).

The only thing that does not work is the fingerprint reader. The drivers for it are still a work in progress and I am tempted to dive in and do some reverse engineering to help the process.