Last night I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix on my eee pc 900. Here’s some initial thoughts:

• very easy to install – all hardware (sound recording with a tiny bit of fiddling) worked out of the box
• the new UI uses screen real-estate more efficiently than my previous XFCE setup

I did have a few issues though:

• trackpad very laggy when viewing the home screen
• audio recording not working

but these were pretty easy to fix.

To fix the trackpad, I followed the directions found here. Basically, it seems that there is an issue with the kernel driver for the touchpad, and the provided kernel images fix this. Hopefully this will be integrated into the next kernel update.

For sound recording, the trick is to enable display of ‘mic’, ‘mic boost’ and ‘capture’ . Once this is done, go to the Options tab and select “Front mic” as input source (mic is the mic jack). Then go to the recording tab, up the volume slider for capture and make sure it is un-muted using the icons below the slider.

Some other mods:

• bind the home key (between Fn and alt – perhaps same key code as the windows key?) to switch between the active app and the home screen. Do this via Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Window Management -> “Hide all normal windows and set focus to the desktop background”
• change the default maximus behaviour (the app that auto-maximises and undecorates apps to utilise screen space) for certain apps, such as the gnome-terminal. Do this via gconf-editor, /apps/maximus/exclude_class

Oh, and I installed vim. Who the hell doesn’t include vim in a base install?!?