Installing Ubuntu 9.04 on an EeePC 900

I've been running Windows XP on my EeePC 900 for a couple of weeks and whilst the ease-of-use has been nice it has been (predictably) getting slower and fatter.

What I've been waiting for is a suitable replacement and yesterdays release of Ubuntu 9.04 provoked an immediate download and install.

I was hoping for something that could actually compete with / surpass Windows XP. I got what I hoped for.

I chose the standard desktop build for my install - I liked the previous NBR, but in the end I wanted it to be more like an ordinary desktop. I did this by downloading the ISO and burning toa CD-R and using a USB DVD-RW drive that I have.

The install itself is a very easy process apart from one stage - the disk partitioning. But more on that later, and remeber I'm describing this from a non-linux experts perspective tempered with the expereince of 10-15 differnet distributions on the EeePC 900.

The install starts ask you all familiar questions about location and keyboard layout wich I have to say it makes very easy. The installer also identifies the resoultion of the EeePC display by default and all the buttons and controlls are correctly positioned for the sice and aspect ratio of the screen.

The next questions are about where to install Ubuntu to. The EeePC 900 boasts 20GB of solid state disk storage, but this is infact split into a 4GB onboard drive and a 16GB secondary drive. The problem that I consistently encounter, even with installers that are supposedly designed for netbooks, is that they don't suggest a split installation where both disks are utilised. This meant that I ended up doing my own partitioning. I have to say that some installers make that proposition a very tricky process, but the Ubuntu 9.04 installer was easy to use and quickly enabled me to set up the following:

• 4GB SSD: single partition mounted as '/'
• 16GB SSD: 2GB swap partition, 4GB partition mounted as '/usr' and 10GB partition mounted as '/home'

From that point onwards things where very easy - provide my user details and off it went. The install took about 30 minutes and completed without event.

Then the reboot. I know that Ubuntu have been saying that they have improved boot times, but I was very impressed at how fast the OS booted. Not more than 30 seconds.

The interface iteself looks great, but what made me oven happier was to find that it had already identified the hardware so that audio, wlan, lan, function keys and even little things like two-finger scrolling with the trackpad all worked without my needing to do anything.

The experience of using Ubuntu 9.04 I will leave to another bloog post but I must just say that I was pleasantly surprised at just how slick and sorted is it, and how everything just worked in a way that I am not used to encountering with Linux. It may seem trivial, but when I started Firefox up and went to page containing an embedded Flash element, I got the usual popup asking if I wanted to install the plugin. This usually never works. I usually have to download it from Adobe and install it by hand. But I tried it anyway and one dialogue later the plugin has downloaded and installed perfectly.

So if I had to describe my Ubuntu 9.04 experience so far it's this: very slick, but more importantly it all just works.