UNR - Ubuntu Netbook Revisited

I've spent the last couple of days distro hopping on my netbook and ended up with a pretty impressive UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) 10.04. It had been happily running Linux Mint 8 XFCE with full Compiz effects before that.

A couple of weeks ago I installed BackTrack as a live USB distro, but got a bit of an awakening when I found I was lost in KDE3.5. It was hunting around the interface for things, as if I'd never seen Linux before, despite KDE3.5 being the first full time Linux DE I used. It was time to branch out a little if only to brush up my skills and not feel so lost when sitting down at another Linux PC. I have a P3 and P4 desktop, neither of which are capable of running anything beyond XFCE, so the netbook was the obvious target.

When I got my netbook, the first distro I tried on it was UNR 9.10 and had issues that others also had. The brightness flickered constantly between 80% and 90% unable to hit the 85% it was looking for so got caught in a loop. I found that holding the right mouse button over a panel applet for a few seconds knocks it out of that loop. It only kicks back in when you return from a screensaver, hibernate etc. My camera didn't work either, which wasn't a big deal as I'd likely never use it anyway.

These issues don't just affect the UNR Ubuntu, they affect every variant of 9.10 Gnome, including Linux Mint 8. Apart from those issues UNR 9.10 was quite nice, if different. Ultimately the screen flickering was a deal breaker. I don't particularly like the regular Gnome environment anyway, so XFCE was the logical choice. I also found that a regular desktop / laptop UI worked fine on a 10" screen too. So onto this bout of distro hopping.

Keep in mind that my mind has adapted to XFCE, and that these points could probably have been solved if I'd spent longer fighting with them, or could get around the KDE environment to find the right options. KDE just felt confusing for the most part.

I wanted to use a KDE4 distro for a while, I did rather like where KDE were going with it before Mint 8 XFCE got it's settled home on the netbook. I tried PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE which was very slick on the surface but a few niggly things made it a frustrating experience:

• I managed to connect to my NAS with Dolphin but it wouldn't allow any media on there to be played, "cannot play remote file". No matter how I tried to fix this, I couldn't. pyNeighborhood didn't work.
• When connecting to the NAS it often needed authorisation 2 or 3 times before it would connect. It also demanded authorisation if I'd closed and reopened Dolphin.
• Synaptic froze up on me after adding a list of apps I could think of to the queue to the point where I had to hard reboot.
• Trying to connect the NAS, the wizard also froze on me leading to a hard reboot. That was inbetween bouts of "unable to connect" despite me knowing the details were correct.
• Compiz worked beautifully. Not a negative issue but worth a mention as it certainly did impress me, despite the niggly issues I was facing.

I tried Mandriva Spriing 2010 KDE and it wouldn't boot at all. I decided that KDE4 was enough of a stretch so I'd be better doing it with Linux Mint 9 KDE, as I'm at least at home with Mint. I found odd things there which I have to put down to an oversight. It's a 1.3gb DVD iso so there's no space limitations for this.

• I had the same "cannot play remote media" issues as PCLinuxOS, although pyNeighborhood did work so it would play them through that mount point, just not the Network tab in Dolphin.
• I had to install kusers to look at which groups my user account was in and add myself to any that may help access my NAS properly. This is easy, but if you're unfamiliar with the DE, the assumption is "I know how to do this in XFCE, it must be here too, I just can't find it". It's annoying to find that the reason you can't find it, is that it wasn't there to begin with.
• Compiz worked when manually activated but deactivated at random points, it also refused to enable at login despite being told to do so.

So my very brief trip into KDE didn't really work out. I was very impressed with how slick it is, how well some of the plasma applets work, and one day I'll go back to it. I think I've changed in how I use Linux in the last year or so too, which didn't work in KDE's favour. I'm less interested in testing new distros now, I got kinda settled.

Before settling on UNR 10.04 I did try Linux Mint 9 XFCE and found the same niggly Compiz / XFCE panel conflicts as were in Linux Mint 7 XFCE. It also seemed to have the same issues with muting the sound on boot too. These were fixed in 8, but have returned in 9. That led me to try UNR 10.04. I am very impressed with UNR 10.04.

According to the hardware wiki, if you disabled the camera with Fn+F6 at boot before you install it should install without any brightness flickering, USB or camera issues. I never noticed any USB issues before but I certainly had brightness flickering and camera issues. I tried this and it worked for me. I now have a fully functioning netbook, including camera.

I found it easy to install codecs for mp3, mpeg, DVD etc playback. It's very responsive. All in all, I'm loving it so far. I've seen a lot of criticism of the Ubuntu themes, buttons etc but I don't mind them personally. I'll be playing around with different themes and icons anyway. I do tend to like the Nodoka GTK theme and NuoveXT2.2 icons.

This post is not meant to be a review of any of these distros, I don't tend to do reviews. Like so much in life, your mileage may vary with what you do and what hardware you have. My experiences come from using an MSI Wind U100 netbook, and being all too comfy with XFCE. The aim of the game was to force myself into using a different DE for a prolonged period of time, for now that alternate DE is Gnome via the UNR UI.

It's also worth noting that it all of these changes happened over the last couple of days, and that UNR hasn't been installed a day yet, nor is my email, PM, IRC etc set up on it yet. It may be different to live with, but initial impressions are positive.