Experience so far with laptop dual boot of 11.04 and Win XP

[hoppipolla]

All looking good so far! Very, very few issues. Absolutely all my hardware worked without exception straight away, including the wireless! Amazing, no? :)

All the updates were perfect, it installed all the closed source stuff straight away during installation. Absolutely frickin' perfect!

Compiz, perfect. Gnome perfect, Unity perfect. Just great!

Any issues so far?

Well, setting up the dual boot was a little bumpy, just a tiny bit. I accidentally made the Win XP partition smaller than the amount of data in it at the time, and instead of telling me or warning me or stopping me, Ubuntu just tried anyway and threw an error which didn't mean that much, and then didn't allow me to try setting it up automatically again like that without rebooting back into the installation medium (a pendrive, in this case :) ).

Anything else... erm... it works with my Android phone WAY better than Win XP. Win XP just fails to copy anything from it at all, but Ubuntu does it flawlessly! Of course, Win XP is very old now and I'm fairly confident Windows 7 would be able to do it, so I can let Windows off this.

Anything else... erm... not really!

Not a single error, barely any slowdown, fantastic apps, all just great really.

Some of the icons like in Gwibber look a little... I don't know... pixellated and cartoony, which kind of breaks the clean look of the desktop. Oh, and the way windows maximize is a bit odd and sometimes can be irritating, such as when I'm editing images in the GIMP.

The installation process looked and handled beautifully, and the desktop is clean and interesting to look at!

Absolutely astounding how far the desktop has come along in the last few years.

Now, I'm not saying I won't run into problems as I very often do with Linux and Ubuntu, but... sitting here right now with the experience that I've just had... very good :)

The only thing I have to go into Windows for is gaming and to use full-blown apps that I can't get all the features of in things like Empathy.

So, yeah! That's my testimonial for Ubuntu 11.04 on a fairly old Dell Latitude D520 laptop :)


Peace!


Hoppi! ^_^

[ninjaaron]

Some of the icons like in Gwibber look a little... I don't know... pixellated and cartoony, which kind of breaks the clean look of the desktop.

So, the most popular "after-market" icon theme is called "Faenza."

The main page for it on deviant art is here (http://tiheum.deviantart.com/art/Faenza-Icons-173323228).

GUI instructions to install:
Should you want to install it, open the software center, go to Edit>Software Sources. In the dialog box, go to the "Other Software" tap, and click the "Add" button at the bottom. In the blank, put ppa:tiheum/equinox

Add the source, and close the dialog. A little thing will pop up that says "updating" in the side-bar. Restart the software center, and there should be an option for "equinox" in the sidebar. Faenza Icon Theme is the package.

The Equinox themes are also pretty cool. I'm using one at the moment.

terminal command to do all that much faster:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tiheum/equinox ; sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install faenza-icon-theme

Terminal is wonderful, once you get used to it.

[hoppipolla]

That's cool about that theme :)

However... for some reason (probably because I used to spend so long playing around with settings and themes and all sorts in Linux in the past), this time... I just want to use it the normal way as it looks out of the box, to just kinda experience normal Ubuntu! Usually I would theme it and bung KDE on here and do all this crazy stuff, but these days the basic look is (other than the tiny imperfections like I said) really gorgeous and I don't wanna spoil it haha

Sign of an improving visual interface I think!

You're doing well Canonical keep it up!! ^_^