Miscellaneous
There is a good chance that a recently acquired netbook will come with a Windows 7 Starter Edition license. This OS comes without Aero and is of course lighter than Windows 7 Home or Professional edition, but it’s not necessarily the best for a mini-PC. Why go without an advanced graphical interface and instead look at a more reactive and better adapted system than Windows 7? This is possible by installing the alternative Ubuntu Netbook Edition. We will look at this operating system and everything that comes with it in this article.
The challenge: finding an OS better adapted to the netbook and its usage
While we don’t all have tactile tablets at the moment, it has certainly been noticed that a large number of users do own netbooks. These are more financially attractive and economical than laptops and in a lot of cases can replace full computers or provide a viable alternative as a second computer in the house or for mobile users. We won’t be specifically looking at what characterises a netbook, but in this article we will state that these mini-computers are generally powered by an Intel AtomNXXX processor, come with 512 or 1 024 MB of RAM and an Intel GMA 950 graphics circuit. Their overall hardware configuration won’t be as powerful as a laptop or ultra-portable computer either. Throughout this article, it’s this last point that we will be focussing on, as it opens the question of whether Windows is the most adapted operating system for a netbook and its standard daily uses.
"Ubuntu Netbook Edition", the optimised distribution
We know that the majority of recent netbooks are provided with Windows Seven Edition Starter, while older models would have been installed with Windows XP. A user who wants to look outside these systems may take a look at a GNU/Linux distribution instead of a commercial OS. We were recently interested by JoliCloud OS and today we will be taking a look at Ubuntu Netbook Edition which has caught our attention. The work being undertaken between Canonical and Moblin (Mobile Linux Internet Project) has resulted in an open operating system which has been especially optimised for netbooks, taking into consideration less powerful hardware configurations and battery life. Ubuntu Netbook Edition also comes with a reworked graphical interface that we will look at, adapted to netbooks and social networks.
Required hardware configuration and preinstalled application packs
The recommended pre-requisites to install Ubuntu Netbook Edition are an Intel Atom processor, at least 384 MB of RAM and 4 GB of drive space (SSD or hard drive). We will add to this that you will also need a graphics card capable of displaying 3D. This means that most current netbooks should be compatible! At this stage, you are probably wondering what applications are available, but it can be said that Internet programs are present (Firefox 3 browser, IM Evolution client, Empathy e-mail client, Liferea RSS player), an office suite (OpenOffice.org) multimedia applications (Rhythmbox multimedia player, F-Spot photo reader, FBReader eBook reader) and audio/video codec’s (MPEG4 (H.264), MP3, AAC, Windows Media).
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