Netbook setting up advice

[serge_o]

If you're asking me, I've never had any problem with any Live USB install using the Pendrive installer and Persistence - at first for many reboots the Live USB works exactly like a "real" install whenever the USB is in place, but eventually they seem to develop bugs like failing to find the computer's hard drive or suddenly deciding some password is required when no password was ever defined. So I don't say Live USB is a reliable substitute for a real install, but it's an excellent no risk way to try out versions with full system functionality.

As for the current dual boot hard drive installation of Lubuntu 10.10 on my Acer One, no problems so far (knock on wood). My only beef is Lubuntu's assortment of preinstalled software was not what I want, and I spent too much time uninstalling and then installing different programs: Mint LXDE for me has much better Day 1 software.

I was asking about problems because there is a known issue with netbooks and USB boot. Good that you have none.

Tell me, what is the reason for you to use 10.10 and not 11.10 on your ACER? Do you think that the newest version will run slower on a netbook? or is it because of unity?

I personally installed a normal 11.10 Ubuntu on my girlfriend's netbook HP (I personally run normal laptops and desktops also with 11.10) - and it runs rather ok, but sometimes I guess it is slower than it should be.
Did you have a bad experience with 11.10/11.04 so that you use 10.10?

for me one of the reasons not to use 10.10 was that they stuck with mozilla FF 3. and I wanted that my distro has the newest mozilla FF

[I2k4]

I tested a lot of alternatives on Live USB over the last year or so, and found the 11.x versions of Lubuntu and even more Ubuntu/Unity 11.04/11.10 noticeably slower than 10.10 on the netbook. I sometimes joke that I think between Unity and Gnome 3 Ubuntu versions (and Mint 12) are going through a sort of "Vista" phase, a major and more demanding but still half-baked OS rebuild, and they're leaving a lot of users behind.

I haven't had problems keeping Firefox and Chrome up to date with Synaptic PM - the only terminal command I routinely use is:

sudo apt-get updates

and that seems to goose the packages. (I also learned to add "ppa" repositories to Synaptic to get other things.)

I don't personally like Unity and as I wrote above prefer Mint preinstalled packages and its general look and feel, and so far am liking Mint 11 LXDE as a dual boot candidate for my main machine.

[serge_o]

I tested a lot of alternatives on Live USB over the last year or so, and found the 11.x versions of Lubuntu and even more Ubuntu/Unity 11.04/11.10 noticeably slower than 10.10 on the netbook. I sometimes joke that I think between Unity and Gnome 3 Ubuntu versions (and Mint 12) are going through a sort of "Vista" phase, a major and more demanding but still half-baked OS rebuild, and they're leaving a lot of users behind.

I haven't had problems keeping Firefox and Chrome up to date with Synaptic PM - the only terminal command I routinely use is:

sudo apt-get updates

and that seems to goose the packages. (I also learned to add "ppa" repositories to Synaptic to get other things.)

I don't personally like Unity and as I wrote above prefer Mint preinstalled packages and its general look and feel, and so far am liking Mint 11 LXDE as a dual boot candidate for my main machine.

I see. maybe I should try 10.10 on the netbook, too. because 11.10 is rather slow (nevertheless - 11.10 is faster than the factory win7 install on that netbook, so changing to ubuntu was a gain in performance nevertheless).

as to keeping firefox up-to-date - up to date and "newest version" are different things.
when you do apt-get update in 10.10 you normally get the "up to date version" of the old firefox 3.6.xx. You can check on this - just look the version up in firefox-help-about firefox menu. My up-to-date 10.10 Ubuntu shows 3.6.xx, but the current version of firefox is already 9.0. that is, ubuntu 10.10 is stuck with the december 2010 version of firefox (if they did not change anything).
this is one of the disadvantages of ubuntu - a distro is locked within a major package version - so that you basically never get a newer version with an older distro(through apt-get - if you want to you can download/compile manually or you have to change distro for that)

chrome is a different story, as all google products are. they are always the newest version.

OOPS: I just checked and saw that firefox is now the latest version in 10.10, it installed with the last system update. nice.

[TealLeader]

Linux is a lot more fun when the hard drive you depend on is not at risk.

I guess I was getting ahead of myself. You're right, I shouldn't risk the drive just for initial learning. Thanks for the sober second thoughts.

The net book finally came but I currently don't have a USB large enough off of which to run Ubuntu comfortably. Is Wubi a good alternative or is that also risky for my hard drive?

[PhilGil]

No, Wubi won't pose a risk to your Window install. Your Ubuntu system is contained in a single Windows file. Because of that, Wubi isn't recommended for long-term use, but it will give you very good idea of what a native Ubuntu install will feel like.

[I2k4]

I've had no experience with Wubi - my guess has been that on top of already slow W7 on my netbook it would be a strain and hard to gauge comparative performance. USB is slower than HDD, but you get a pretty good feel for the zip of different Linux versions against each other and against Windows. The version 10 Ubuntu and Mint installs are all faster on USB than Windows 7 on HDD.

FYI, re Firefox, I used this to get the beta channel into Synaptic:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next
sudo apt-get update

I'm running FF11 beta in Linux (I don't go past FF9 in Windows because I like Cooliris image browser, which is slow to catch up with these new releases.)