Ubuntu 9.04 Released, including UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix)


Another day, another Ubuntu release! Version 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackelope) came out yesterday so I had to see what was new with it. One neat new version is a version created just for netbooks like the Asus EEE pc which you can install on a USB drive. Since the netbook version is not officially released until April 30, the current version did not have a torrent available, so I had to download it via a web link which still took 30 minutes even on Wash U's speedy Internet connection. Plus since I still help maintain wuarchive.wustl.edu, I put a copy of it there, but I think that will only help people here on campus who want to download it. It seems like EIT in engineering has severely limited off-campus access to the archive, which is sad indeed. Once the official UNR version comes out, I can bittorrent that one down and update our site.

In any case, I downloaded the IMG file and copied it over using good, old command line dd to a 1GB USB drive I had. I then rebooted my Dell Latitude D630 with the flash drive intact to see how it would deal with a more standard corporate laptop as opposed to a netbook. It came up in a snap and gave me their easy to use interface which makes it quite user friendly. It did not work too well with the built-in wifi card on the Latitude, but picked up the wired ethernet adapter just fine. In any case it worked pretty well and I like the idea of live booting from a flash drive. I do not know why the distribution had to be so large (over 900MB) when the standard Ubuntu CD ISO image is only about 700MB. I guess they assume most people will install it on a 1GB flash drive so they are not constrained to the 700MB CD limit.

Today is the last day of Geeks.com's free shipping sale. One nifty device I noticed is an IDE to Compact Flash adapter ($4.95) and that essentially turns a CF card into an IDE hard drive. I checked on eBay and various folks are selling similar adapters in the $4-5 range. Similar devices for SD cards cost about $11-$15 on eBay but Geeks.com does not seem to sell them. In either case you should be able to get 8GB SD cards for about $20 or 8GB CF cards for about $25 so in both cases you end up with a 8GB SSD for a total price of ~$30. At Geeks.com their 8GB CF card is $28.00 so with the adapter and free shipping they add up to a reasonable $32.95, but you need to spend $17 more to get the free shipping (otherwise you have to pay $8.00 S/H and there goes that nice price!). Another good deal they have is 15 foot CAT 5E cables for only $1.99 each. If I needed $50 worth of them (i.e. 25 cables) they would have been a steal! Alas, I guess I will just save both my time and the university's money and not buy anything from Geeks.com's lovely sale.

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