[Wolves] Ubuntu on Wolverhampton High Street and UMPC redux

[Political Penguin]

Stephen Welch wrote:
> Hi Penguin.
>
> 2008/8/8 Political Penguin <fish at politicalpenguin.org.uk>:
>
> <snip>
>
>   
>> I decided to have a little look at the kit on offer and then it struck me,
>> that the laptop, or to be precise netbook/UMPC (think it was an Elonex one)
>> had a desktop that looked familiar. To be precise a brownish coloured gnome
>> desktop. Anyway, just wanted to share that with people, I think that's the
>> first time I've seen Ubuntu running on a pc in a shop and it was a pleasant
>> surprise.
>>     
>
> Wow. That is a first for Ubuntu and probably a first for Wolverhampton
> if you exclude the traffic lights!!
>
>   
>> I also wondered if anyone has or is planning on picking up one of these
>> UMPC/netbooks and if it didn't come with some pre-installed version of Linux
>> like Xandros on the EeePC's then how they got on?
>>     
>
> On an aside I installed the netbook remix on my eee 701 running 8.04
> and the UI looks good for these sort of laptops it was a little bit
> clunky but some people have reported getting it running well.  Have
> you tried this or anyone else?  I really look forward to an official
> release.
>
> I read sometime ago that mobile or specialist hardware (embedded
> devices) running some sort of linux version will lead the way with
> spreading the use linux into homes and the hands of the general
> public.   This appears to be the case!!
>
> Stephen
>
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>   
I haven't tried the netbook remix of Ubuntu. I saw various videos and 
screenshots of it and thought it looked interesting but didn't really 
fit my needs. I think a lot has to do with the available screen 
resolution. On the EeePC 701 with an 800 pixel width I think it would 
fit really well and improve user functionality but on the MSI 
Wind/Advent 4211 with a 1024 pixel width resolution I think it's not an 
issue to have a standard gnome desktop. Height is still slightly reduced 
but less important. I think only twice have a had to forcefully move a 
window because the options had dropped off the bottom of the screen. 
Auto-hiding the top panel and dropping the bottom panel altogether 
squeeze a nice bit of extra screen space and with an auto-hiding dock on 
the bottom (using cairo-dock) to act as an app launcher seems to work 
really well. Either that or that's just what I've become used to my my 
desktop and am just replicating it. However that is pretty much the 
point of Linux, it's about our freedom to choose to do things the way we 
like and this just suits me at the moment.

There is a vid on Youtube somewhere that does show someone running the 
Netbook Remix version on an MSI Wind/Advent 4211. Not entirely sure but 
when I was looking at trying Remix there seemed to be a lot of people 
having problems with Compiz-Fusion so I decided to give it a miss on the 
basis that my little things like ring switcher etc were more important 
to me. Not sure if that's the case, haven't seen any examples of Remix 
running with compiz-fusion, have you tried it?

Gareth