Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

My First Week (and change) with a Natty Netbook

09 May 2011

Pretty much immediately after the release of the newest Ubuntu (Natty Narwhal), I downloaded it and replaced my existing version of Ubuntu (Maverick Meerkat) on my Netbook.

There’s been a lot of discussion regarding whether Unity was a good choice or a very bad thing since it appeared on Meerkat. I’m not going to pretend to resolve that issue, but I will say that I don’t mind it on my Netbook. It was present in Meerkat, and it’s present in Narwhal. I can say that it’s greatly improved since Meerkat, and if you didn’t like it there, you should probably give it another shot before passing judgement.

The OS speed improvement for me was drastic and obvious in Unity as well as in the rest of the OS. Applications seemed to fire open where they were poky to say the least before.

The Operating System improvements are nice as well. Upgraded software versions, and changes to the media player are welcome.

There are some things that I would like to see some improvement on as well.

First of all, Unity doesn’t let you move the bar. While the screen size of your average Netbook definitely loans itself to having the bar on the side, it would be nice to have the ability to move it on my Desktop, and I might just want to have it on the right instead of the left? Maybe?

The other thing that I’ve been trying to do is change the wallpaper on my login screen. Seems like it should be a pretty straight forward and easy thing to do right? But no, I’ve tried every utility I can find, copied files here there and everywhere. Nothing works. If anybody reading this can give me a heads up as to how this is accomplished, I would gladly take that advice.



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