Anyone who knows me soon comes to realise I am a Linux JUNKIE. Not only do I use it on my netbook, napoleon (white ASUS 1000HE running Linux Mint 7) and recommend it for servers as much as possible, but I’m always trying new distros.

I keep coming back to Ubuntu and its’ derivatives – some which are better than others.

And I keep asking myself “Why ?”. What is it about Ubuntu that makes it so appealing, so easy to use and almost a necessity ?

The latest beta release, which will be a full release on October 28th, is a good example of the reason why.

Released into beta on October 1st, I download the 690Mb ISO disk image tonight and immediately created a bootable SD card of it – the ASUS 1000HE has a built-in SD card reader that you can boot from – using Unetbootin. Of course, you can use the same program to create a bootable USB key, but the SD card (8Gb) is out of the way and always present in the netbook, plus it leaves my internal drive with Linux Mint alone !

So – we reboot napoleon (see Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey for the name reference) and select SD Card as the boot device. The first thing we notice is a white Ubuntu logo that remains on the screen for what seems like an eternity – I put that down to the fact that this is the first bootup and the SD card is markedly slower than the internal hard drive. This may improve on reboot due to caching, but that will have to be tested later.

Next, a very “tasteful” boot screen appears – sort of a spotlighted Ubuntu logo with the almost-obligatory moving progress bar – and, even on the SD card, vanishes after a few seconds. WTF, it’s crashed !!  No, not so….

As this SD card is created from the Live CD image, the next thing that appears is the desktop with the usual Gnome menus.

Damn, this thing is quick – and it’s the first beta !!!

Stay tuned for Part the Second, as I see what’s working on napoleon and what needs tweaking.