Not so much of a daily annoyance this one but a disappointment all the same. I've been a fan of netbooks since they came out - in fact since before they came out - Atari Portfolio or Psion MX anyone ?
Anyhow I usually run a flavour of Linux on them just because its free and I like to fiddle. Did I mention all my unfinished projects
I had XP on my netbook recently as I was using it for testing an install package for a colleague however as that is done I thought I would take it back to Linux and did what I normally do which is check Distrowatch and see if there is anything interesting. I decided a safe bet for now would be Ubuntu and there is a new version out - woo! I downloaded it, prepared a USB key install and went ahead, Ubuntu has always been good so far with few problems and loads of support. Plus a dead simple method of installing new software. But...
What a pile of pants 11.04 is.
Now I am not having a go at the developers who do this partly for free and they are far more clever than I am but there are some poor choices here.
It comes with something called Unity which is like those naff front end menu things that PC makers circa 1992 put onto their machines because Windows (3.0) was too complicated - click here for the Internet, here for email, here to write a letter and so on. I'm sure some people would love this but there is a reason why Packard Bell stopped installing it all those years ago.
And nowadays a lot of people do know what packages they want to use for these purposes.
Also turning it off was not at all obvious.
I eventually found out how to swap back to a normal menu and all seemed well until I plugged the netbook into my home monitor - nothing happened. Tried to detect monitors - nope. Switched back and forth from the standard to the NVidia 'closed' driver (the netbook has an ION graphics card) - nope, nothing. It acts as if nothing is there.
A quick google to find a solution finds...
...loads of people with the same problem and no solution.
So I gave up.
Instead I'm now running a much older copy of Mint which is Ubuntu but with evil, nasty, selfish closed software added - I like Linux for the technical aspects, not the politics so that is fine with me. My external monitor works, my effects work, my wireless works - its all good. But this has wasted a lot of browsing and project time.
But I suppose that was the point
BTW My netbook of choice at the moment is the Asus 1201N with a 4GB Upgrade - noice.
