Nicholas Schmidt

Nicholas Schmidt

Dad, CTO, and lover of all things 1's and 0's.

9.10 UNR mini-review

1 minute read

Just wanted to post some thoughts on UNR 9.10 –

Most of the netbooks utilize the Intel i915 based video cards and have HORRID performance under the latest xorg drivers. 9.10 fixes this and allows for UXA acceleration and was my main reason for skipping over 9.04 UNR. The image installs quickly and provides for the basic web based programs. The EXT4 (I use it on all my desktop/laptop now) allows for quick boots and shutdowns on the MSI Wind I have. A few points on 9.10 UNR:

  • The interface shows some tearing without compiz. Due to a bug right now in 9.10 compiz is disabled, so hopefully it will be fixed

  • Wireless drivers in 9.10 are being massively overhauled and the WPA2 function on 802.11n are iffy right now. I swapped a BCM4300 and RT8190 and both had issues with WPA2 making the netbook a little useless for me at this time

  • Skype and Pidgin go full screen. UNR is designed to be mostly one application at a time. If you have used Moblin you are familiar with the shortcoming

  • Evolution is included and a little heavy for the netbook. With that said I installed sun-java5 and was able to utilize the MAPI portions of Evolution with my work exchange server. All on 1024×600 sized screen

I would say in varying degrees of usefulness it would be Moblin –> UNR –> Full Distro. I love Moblin, but a lack of Fedora yum compatible repos leaves me wanting for OpenOffice and others. Full distro takes too much time and customizing to get GNOME to fit, while UNR is right in between. I love the fact that I can still do sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng and be one step away from UNR to WEP/WPA hacker :)

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