I use Ubunut in my other more powerful laptop and I am very satisfied with it. After the clean install, I configured it very well and now it runs perfectly. So I decided to try Ubuntu Easy Peasy (I think the version was 8.04.1) on Eee PC 901. I had reinstalled Xandros in my Eee 901 which worked very well, I didn’t have any complaint’s but with installing some packages (dependencies). However installing Ubuntu Easy Peasy was completely waste of time.
Things that didn’t work out of the box are:
- Webcam
- Bluetooth (I am not able to connect with my mobile phone to the Internet)
- Wireless with WPA encrypted networks
- Function key (Fn)
- Microphone
- The video files (movies).
Though there are known solutions to make all these working I didn’t want to waste my time with and restored back the Xandros which I had backed up.
And one more thing that I was not satisfied with is the noticeably slow boot time of Ubuntu Easy Peasy compared to Xandros Easy Mode.
For other Eee PC models probably these probably do not exist. If you want to try Ubuntu on your Eee PC there is very nice how to article “How to install Easy Peasy (formerly Ubuntu-EEE) on an EEE PC”. But in case that you may also not like it, I would recommend you first to back up your system.
Computers, linux
901, easy peasy, eee pc, linux, ubuntu, xandros
After an out of the box install of Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid all my fonts seemed to me too large. These large fonts don’t seem very elegant and thankfully I also don’t have vision problems with my eyes. The article "The Absurdity of GNOME Font Sizes" discusses about the big fonts in ubuntu but does not tell much how to make our fonts smaller. So I decided to look around the settings what do we have and after checking my appearance settings I could set nice looking smaller fonts globally on my desktop.I achieved this nice effect from
"System settings->Appearance->Fonts".
Here you have to:
- Enable "anti-aliasing" or also font smoothing. This makes your fonts more smooth – less edged – and the text is more easy to read.
- From the extra configuration options for anti-aliasing disable "exclude range" and enable "use sub-pixel rendering". In the first option the default range is small and will not affect the small fonts – the result will be that letters will look edged. Sub-pixel rendering enhances the quality. Current computers are powerful enough so that these changes will not make any visible performance impact.
- Now you have to also choose: "Force fonts DPI" to be 96 DPI. Actually this is what makes your fonts look smaller. I use 1400×1050 so this DPI for me looks pretty OK. If you have lower resolution and want smaller fonts probably you may either think of encreasing your desktop resolution or tweeak the fonts size DPI manually to some lower value of 96DPI. The article "How to change the X11 DPI under kUbuntu" tells more about custom DPI settings.
- Then you have to logoff and login so that chages take effect.
I wished I put some screen shots to demonstrate the effect but I am lazy now to revert back and forth with my configuration. Probably later.
Computers
font DPI, font size, intrepid, small font, ubuntu