Ubuntu Remix

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Yesterday, a person from our department brought in a new Dell Latitude 2100. This is a 'netbook' with a touch-screen. It has no optical drive and is powered by an Intel Atom processor. I was told that I could 'play' for a little while. Well, as you can guess, I took Ubuntu Remix for a spin.

Ubuntu Remix is especially made for netbooks running an Intel Atom processor. I downloaded the 9.04 release and put it on a USB drive. I put the drive in an available USB (it has 3) and booted the system from it. I have never done that before and was surprised at the speed!

When the screen loaded, I was greeted with the Remix desktop. What this post is really about, however, was that, surprise, everything worked -- sound, wifi, 3D graphics, and more astonishingly, the touch screen. I could just drag my finger across the screen to move the cursor and tap on an app icon to launch the app.

Once again, Open Source (in this case, Ubuntu) is fully functional with most of today's hardware.  When are we going to leave behind the dictatorship of Microsoft and embrace FREEDOM?

~~~
In the Grace of the Three in One,

OD

Comments

Jeremiah W. Montgomery said…
Such an interesting contrast between this post and the one on government healthcare. Single-source software is said to be consistently upstaged by a distributed model; yet a single-payer healthcare model will provide the best solution?

As the OS world demonstrates, private competition tends to drive up quality and drive down costs. The problem with healthcare is that insurance has replaced personal budgeting and savings, and litigation has run wild.

Always fun to stop by...
04 November, 2009 09:43
odysseus said…
I never said a 'single-payer healthcare model' is a solution. And from what I've read (so far), that is not on the table. I agree about the insurance companies, however. Adding in an affordable option for the over 40 million who needs medical care would hopefully add to the quality of service.

Concerning driving down costs and driving up quaility in software: I see just the opposite every day at my office. While Win7 comes in a variety of flavors that range from $200 and up, the quality is not as good as free software in some cases. For example: a young person brought in a tablet PC that wanted to upgrade to Vista Ultimate. According to the company website, the device would work with Vista Ultimate. However, when we tried to install it, we were met with an error stating that, because of a device driver, Windows would not install. A DEVICE DRIVER! I've never seen Windows do that before. It has always installed and then gave a list of devices it couldn't install. Not this time. It just would not install.

For giggles, I took an Ubuntu CD and and booted the system from it. Everything worked. I had the desktop, the touchscreen worked, the wifi worked, sound, video, etc. The other techs were completely impressed. I said, 'Hm... $400 software versus free software. I ain't sayin' nuthin'.

Thanks for coming by! I'm a silent reader of your posts all the time. I'm like a blog ninja!
04 November, 2009 10:12
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