I’ve been using a Dell Mini netbook for about five months now, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It’s lightweight and small, making it easy to tote to the library, park, or coffee shop. The battery life is very good (I get about five hours of typical use off the grid), and though the keyboard is small (and annoyingly laid out for a touch typist), I can easily plug in a cheap USB keyboard for those times when I need to do extended typing. When my desktop computer is commandeered for a round of Club Penguin or some hardcore Lego Digital Designer work, I can retreat to the porch and still get work done.
But lately I’ve been plagued by system stability issues. The wireless connection randomly conks out when I’m using Firefox, and the browser crashes regularly. I get weird JavaScript errors (preventing me from sending Facebook “Mafia Wars” energy packs to my wife, which has begun to affect my marriage…), and whenever I try to use the Ubuntu system updater I get strange failures. My Firefox has been out of date, and system upgrades have been difficult to perform. And I wasn’t really thrilled with the stripped-down Dell desktop view, which makes switching between applications or getting to the file manager more tedious than it needs to be.
So I decided that the time had come for a major upgrade: the Ubuntu Netbook Remix for 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.
The upgrade process itself wasn’t difficult at all, particularly if you follow the instructions. I was burned in my initial attempt by trying to skip a step; don’t be like me …
I did steps 1 through 3 on a Windows XP desktop; you can accomplish the same results on a Mac or Linux machine (indeed, if you’re brave or have small fingers, you can do it on your netbook).
- Download the flash image IMG distribution
- Perform MD5 checksum (this is what I skipped, and it cost me an hour of aggravation when my initial download turned out to be corrupted)
- Use an image-writer tool to transfer the flash image to a USB device
- Boot up the netbook with the USB device installed, and hold down the “0″ key for boot options
- You can test drive the netbook remix (highly recommended) to verify that it will work with your hardware, running the OS off the USB device
- When you’re ready to install, reboot into the boot options and follow the prompts for basic configuration
Note that this will wipe your netbook clean; back up anything you want to save, including your e-mail client settings. (Evolution Mail, the default client, has a nice backup utility that will make a TAR of your mailboxes for easy re-installation.) I’d also recommend installing the Xmarks Firefox plugin and saving your bookmarks to the network: I’ve been using Xmarks (née Foxmarks) since getting the netbook as a way of sharing bookmarks with my desktop, but it’s also a great utility for backing up your browser bookmarks.
So far (albeit after just a morning’s work), Jaunty Jackalope is more stable than the original Dell version of 8.x, and I like the interface a lot better. The things I work with most are right up front on the desktop, and I can easily see what applications are running and switch between them without a lot of ALT+TAB toggling. Most important, though, I was able to send my wife a Mafia Wars energy pack, which I hope will keep me from being capped.