Canonical Talks Netbook Remix Details

geekinchief points to a just-posted interview at Laptop Magazine "with Canonical's market manager, Gerry Carr, where he talks about Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Some interesting details: Canonical does not plan to make the Netbook remix available for download or sale. It will only come pre-installed on new systems. It will boot in 5-10 seconds."

uh

who talks what about the whatnow?

5-10 seconds?!

That's not even enough time for me to get my pants off!

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But I want it now.

--Homer Simpson

Not available?

Canonical does not plan to make the Netbook remix available for download or sale

Not true. The won't make them available as ISOs ready for installation (since apparently they don't recommend it), but the packages can be downloaded from Launchpad.

Re:Not available?

Which, to my mind, is kind of annoying. I would dearly like to see ISOs for the MSI Wind that I plan on buying, or the eeePC that my wife might wind up getting.

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Whilst an iso would be useful, it isn't too hard to install a normal Ubuntu/whatever distro onto a laptop - or even an EeePC (my Eee runs Kubuntu).
Once installed, it is relatively easy to customise to your own tastes/needs. For example, I removed all the

Re:Not available?

How do you replicate a 5-10 second start time? I have an eeePC and was thinking about switching from its default Xandros, but the 5-10 second Xandros boot time that is replicated by Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a key feature.

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I wonder if I can install that version of Ubuntu on my old, full size laptop... 5-10 second boot would be awesome on my T42.

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That is the one part of the MSI Wind that bothers me, actually: the Windows model is the one with more RAM and Bluetooth, and since integrated Bluetooth is important to me, I'm going to buy that one. OTOH, I will probably leave WinXP on there, for Diablo

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FYI, Diablo II runs flawlessly in wine.

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FYI, Diablo II runs flawlessly in wine.

Thanks for mentioning this. Most of Blizzard's games are written with OpenGL support (probably to provide a Mac version), so the Diablo I & II/LOD, Starcraft, World of Warcraft all run well under WINE.

eeeXubuntu

eeeXubuntu [eeeuser.com] works fine for me for several months now.

You don't need a company, a community is more than enough.

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Which, to my mind, is kind of annoying. I would dearly like to see ISOs for the MSI Wind that I plan on buying, or the eeePC that my wife might wind up getting.

So you'll burn the ISO onto a CD and then pop it into the....oh yeah. That's why they're not useful.

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Put ISO on USB Drive Use Daemon Tools to mount ISO Run LiveCD ??? Ubuntu

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If you want Ubuntu, and you want this device, you can simply go and buy it.

In other words, they'd rather you buy the Ubuntu-branded version than buy the Windows version, then download and install Ubuntu.

I wonder if this will successfully force the sales numbers to reflect Ubuntu's popularity?

Re:Not available?

Makes perfect sense to me.
They're required by GPL to provide the sources to anyone who purchases one of those notebooks. They're not required to post the ISOs, though.

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I wonder how long it will take for a CentUbuntu to pop up and make ISOs for those who don't want to install from .debs.

So easy to get rich...

Just say :

1/ "Hello M. Manufacturer"
2/ +"5-10$/notebook for a fully fledged, hand tailored os"
3/ +"garanteed OS/drivers support for that particular system hardware for 5 years" (about same as Ubuntu LTS)
4/ +"instead of 90$ for microsoft and no garantees fr

not a big fan

Ubuntu built its base on the ability to easily, cleanly displace the dominant OS. Now that they've got some traction they reverse directions in a market that provides next to no freedom for users? Color me unimpressed- if they really want software to be free, the first step is giving people the ability to choose between the codebases that already exist.

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What the hell are you talking about? RTFA

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I'm talking about the fact that an end user cannot easily install this on their own devices. Software freedom for the end user is about the ability to choose between competing software products, not just the ability to modify the codebase. In this case, Ub

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This OS is optimized for specific hardware. It would probably not work very well on just any PC. Or at least that is what I got from TFA.

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The only optimizations mentioned in TFA are to take advantage of the Atom's power saving capabilities- which essentially consists of a few minor kernel tweaks. There's no reason why that couldn't be split into a linux-atom metapackage, assuming that isn't

No ISO because UMPC hardware is different

The new class of UMPCs have specialized hardware that is much closer to the user space than the more general-purpose machines we use today. The XO-1, for example, has dedicated keys on the keyboard for context switching, mesh networking hardware that inte

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What, are you saying you want a *preposition* in the headline. "Canonical Talks *ABOUT* Netbook Remix Details"?

We don't need no steenkeen prepositions!

And don't get me started about "Canonical Discusses Netbook Remix Details" or all those other ways to sa