I recently upgraded a friend of mine to Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop for his five-year-old Acer laptop with 512 MB of RAM. I installed the latest stable version of Ubuntu and he immediately fell in love. What came next was a bit of a shock.

Wow!

As Ubuntu popularity grows, more and more students are recognizing the added features and potential savings offered by an Ubuntu laptop. Netbooks and laptops are the students solution to computing because of obvious portability reasons.

The Eee PC 901 is an Intel Atom-based laptop, with 1 GB of RAM, a 20 GB SSD, a 9 inch display, and ships with Asus' own Linux distribution. Since I bought mine, I've installed and used Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04. The new Ubuntu 9.04 finally has full support for the Eee PC 901.

A good friend of mine, who is very computer savvy, recently bought a new computer and installed Ubuntu on it rather than Windows. Now, despite being a very smart guy when it comes to PCs and Windows, he was still a newbie to the world of Ubuntu, so he and I went through a series of questions and answers before, during, and after his Ubuntu install.

By the time Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rolls around next April, Canonical is interested in seeing Ubuntu boot on an Intel Atom netbook (specifically the Dell Mini 9) in less than ten seconds. These incredibly fast boot time goals even led Canonical to decide against investing more time in enhancing the boot experience with Red Hat's Plymouth.

I take a live-and-let-live approach to computers that aren't mine. But this changed a few days ago when my father got a new laptop that had Vista pre-installed. He asked me to set things up for him and, to cut a long story short, he got Ubuntu 9.04.

The Eee PC 901 is an Intel Atom-based laptop, with 1 GB of RAM, a 20 GB SSD, and a 9 inch display. Since I bought mine, it's been running Ubuntu 8.04 rather than the default Xandros-based OS. The laptop is surprisingly unfriendly to Ubuntu despite being preloaded with Linux. Ubuntu 8.10 has delivered some improvements for Eee PC laptops, but it still doesn't work perfectly out of the box.

Canonical ships the (K)Ubuntu CDs and I received mine as a New year gift. I was really excited and decided to try it immediately.
My wife has a Dell 6200 Laptop and I tested the LiveCD on it.
I popped in the Live CD and it booted into a nice looking desktop.