So, last night I finally installed Ubuntu Karmic Koala’s Netbook Remix on my netbook. I was pretty nervous. For one, I didn’t want to lose my windows installation, more because it has my only fully licensed copy of Office 2007 on it (thanks to one of my sweet friends), and two because I was not completely sure I’d be able to re-install windows on it without a lot of pain if something went wrong.

Needless to say, my fears were unfounded. It was a little difficult to convert the thumb drive I had into a bootable thumbdrive. But once I had done  that, the rest was easy. I made sure that my drive was as defragmented as it was going to get, so that I had the largest continuous drive space as possible for the re-partitioning.

The re-partitioning was actually the scariest part. I’ve never repartitioned a drive before without losing everything on it. But, Ubuntu handled the operation with the patience and skill of a well trained plastic surgeon. In the end, I didn’t lose a single thing!

Now a little bit about the remix: I freaking love it. Everything worked and connected right out of the box. Wireless, video camera, sound, etc. The only thing that was tricky was that it took running some updates and expanding the software sources before I could really install much, including adobe flash. But, got it all fixed up and working properly.

This is quite different from any previous distributions of ubuntu that I’ve experienced. For instance, the menu is right on the desktop. I assume this is because its a netbook. I like it though, very clean and well organised.

It  also brought in a new instant messaging client. I’m not really sure if I like it or not. It doesn’t seem to tell me if aim people are on mobile or not, which pidgin did. I don’t like IM’ing people on their phones since it could cost them money.

All in all, it’s a great operating system! I think I could recommend that people install this on their netbooks. It’s extremely easy to use, I’d say the easiest yet!

This is a screenshot of my desktop on the new ubuntu distribution. Go to Ubuntu's site (www.ubuntu.com) and perhaps download it for yourself!