Sunday, November 1, 2009

Xubuntu to the rescue


This past month has been busy, but during that time I've been able to install a few distros on my laptop to test drive. Here are some of the distros that I've installed and tried out on my laptop: I've tried Fedora 11, PCLinux 2009, OpenSuse 11.1 and Mandriva 2009.1.
Each distro had its own pros and cons to them, but I found that my preference would lean toward either Fedora or OpenSuse. They both installed well and got me up and running quickly. Their forums answered my questions and were helpful in getting my wifi problems resolved quickly.
The reason that I toured other distros was that I was not entirely encouraged by the Alpha and Beta versions of Ubuntu 9.10.
Now that the final release is out, I'm once again trodding into Ubuntu territory. However, this time I'm trying out Xubuntu (pronounced Zoo-buntu).
Xubuntu uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and is designed for older machines with fewer system resources. This description seems to describe my aging Compaq laptop.
Once I downloaded and burned my CD, the install process was as familiar as installing Ubuntu.
I found that after install, the boot process was much quicker than I ever had loading Ubuntu in the past.
I've posted a video on youtube of the boot process.



I've found that a fix for the suspend bug that plagued the earlier beta versions of 9.10 has been found. I haven't looked into applying it yet, but it's on my to-do list.
For now, I'll keep Xubuntu on my laptop as I'm enjoying the little added speed difference that I'm seeing. I can never say when I may install something else to try out. I did also burn an Ubuntu 9.10 CD as well that I meant to install but thought I'd give Xubuntu a try first.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Xubuntu & Ubuntu can coexist ... they're the same base system.

Install Ubuntu then add the xubuntu-desktop package and voila, you get the option of either gnome (ubuntu) or xfce (xubuntu) at the gdm login screen.

Ubucrates said...

Thanks for your input and while it's totally true that both can coexist, I personally only install one at a time. This is due to the time when I tried to install KDE and Gnome on the same system a few years ago..but that was years ago, but the memories remain.