I have installed this on two machines now. The 1st is the samsung nc10. I instaled through wubi as this is a great way of installing Ubuntu if you wish to keep your Windows installation in one piece (and who wouldn’t). All the hardware is working on 1st attempt including bluetooth and wireless. Even most of the keyboard f keys are working with the exception of the brightness keys. The system is responsive and comparable to windows 7. The open office spreadsheet loads in a reasonable time ( a few seconds) and is very usable. Clearly, the Ubuntu team have worked hard to ensure that Netbooks are covered.

The second installation is a more interesting study in weird hardware. This is an Asus RF1 tablet PC which has caused a great deal of difficulty for both ubuntu 9.x and suse 11.2. This originally came with Windows Vista and as much as I was a fan of Vista (with the right hardware) it was quite unusable. Normally, I would install Windows 7 but we have a lot of PCs in the house and I just can’t justify the cost. Prior to Ubuntu 10.04 I have been using Suse 11.2 but this has given me nothing but greif.

This tablet PC is attached to the plasma screen in the lounge and is generally used to stream video from the main PC in the study. I abandoned ubuntu 9.x as I could not get the spdif out to work and suse refused to automatically connect to the windows 7 network share and recently stopped plaing back 720p video in a smooth manner. So this was the ideal time to test out 10.04.

The installation went a dream. I downloaded the iso and booted off it. The installation found suse and offered to run them both side by side, As I really could not be bothered to reinstall suse again if this did not work I opted to have both.

Once installed I enabled to restricted drivers, run the updater, rebooted a few times and then set about seeing if was going to do what I needed.

Connecting to windows share. This was flawless. Entered the required details and it created a one click access to the movie folder on my windows 7 machines. Perfect. This was something that suse never did let me do.

Play 702p avi / mkv files. I double clicked on the 1st file and the software manager popped up. It infomed me that it needed some codecs and do I want to get them. I agreed and a few seconds later my video was playing.

Next the sound! This has previously caused me no end of grief in both ubunto 9.x and Suse. I eventually got it working in Suse after faffing around with command line settings. This time I went straight to the hardware > sound dialogue switched from analogue to digital and my home cinema kicked in straight away.

All the keyboard f key settings work including brightness and volume and even more surprising.. this is a tablet PC. I took the stylus out and tested it.. perfect.

I switched the plasma over to the PC channel and already the image was on screen without any additional settings required. In less than half an hour I had a free operating system up and running and doing everything I needed it to do.

I am quite frankly shocked. The new look and feel that Ubuntu has is very nice.. way better than the sickly brown-yellow look of years gone by. More importantly it was able to detect a range of quite obscure hardware and make it work. For FREE. Astounding (as a Gruffalo once said).

This is the 1st time I have installed any Linux distro and have not had to touch a console or command line. Well done Canonical. If you have not tried Ubunto for a while give it a go, If you are a windows user download wubi.. it will leave your windows installation untouched.

Oh and don’t forget that Steam is coming to the Linux world soon. If only I could play all my games on Ubuntu I could be tempted to make a complete switch.. OK photoshop too.. oh wait what about.. hmmm

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