ubuntu I have four issues with ubuntu, wireless, dual monitor, network and DVD. The DVD worked from start (6.04) but somehow stopped working after version 7.10. Wireless just works strait away in the newer versions. And it gets easier to set up my laptop to run with my 19″ screen attached to it. And for the life of me I can never get samba to work so that I can see my other PC running ubuntu, but only NFS will.

Ubuntu 9.04 : Update it without any problems but the boot time was getting annoying, since it was over 1m45s. I know what my laptop could do faster, since when I ran a heavy tweaked Windows XP, I got the boot up down to around 35s. I read that ext4 was a faster file system than ext3. So I tried to convert (or what ever it is called) it but after few failed attempts, I had to format the drive to ext4. And got my boot time down to around a minute, still not anything near what I had with XP. And even with reading various blogs on how to speed up ubuntu it never got any faster.

Ubuntu 9.10 : They said in the run up to the release that they were working on booting up time, which I couldn’t argue against. When the RC came out I couldn’t wait and updated, but the boot time was just getting slower. And even after the full release of 9.10 the boot time was just above 1m10s.

Xubuntu 9.10 : So the other day I got bored and wanted to see if there was any differences between xubuntu and ubuntu, it said on the box that it would be lighter on your system compared to ubuntu

Downloaded, burned the ISO, installed and was up and running in no time. Even with formatting getting a ubuntu flavor onto your PC/laptop is sooo much faster than windows. Still a bit of a problem with the extra monitor but a quick download of the right driver and update of the xorg.conf I was up and running. Some tweaks to the look of xfce, since I didn’t like the default look/theme, I now have a nice looking theme with some transparency (sweet eye candy) and my boot time is just over 40s. WiFi works out of the box, DVD is still dead and networking is still a bit of a work but NFS is so easy to set up.

The best part is that now I can fire up Firefox and Chrome in under four seconds ! Where before it was around 10-12 seconds. And other programs are also starting up in no time at all, xubuntu have really breath new some life into my 3 year old laptop 🙂

Now I just have to get used to the menu in xubuntu and that some programs are called different things but I can either get used to that or install the program I’m used too. The only issue I have found so far is that the System Monitor tends to freeze on me and eat cpu and ram like no tomorrow.

I like what I see so far.