| Xubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Review |
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| Sunday, 08 November 2009 00:00 | |
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I've been planning a review of Xubuntu for quite some time now, so the release of 9.10 provided a good opportunity. Since Xubuntu has a reputation for running well on older hardware, I decided I'd give it a real test and install it on a boat anchor that I still had in the closet -- A 650MHz Pentium III clone with 384MB of ram and 2-13GB hard drives. This just barely meets the suggested (not absolute) minimum hardware requirements specified by the Xubuntu team. The installation to a dedicated partition went without a hitch. I was pleasantly surprised by the results -- performance was actually more than acceptable for a second or third PC. Firefox and Thunderbird both loaded in about 3 seconds, and web browsing was almost as fast as my primary PC.
Appearance The new boot experience is indeed prettier, and there's a new GUI user chooser that's nice. The Xfce desktop was a pleasant surprise as well -- the default theme is sharp and crisp, I really liked the icons. If you don't like the default theme, the Xfce4 desktop comes with over 30 different themes you can choose from. Just go to Applications > Settings > Appearance and choose from the list. The new theme is applied immediately, so it's easy to see what it will look like. The layout of the menus, panels and notification areas is very similar to Ubuntu's. Xfce4 also includes a number of applets which can be added to the panels -- right-click on a blank spot on one of the panels and choose Add New Items, then select from the list. There are some very useful applets available, such as for the weather, a cpu graph, mail notification, a notes application and others -- about 30 in all.
Applications I was surprised to find that both AbiWord and Open Office.org were installed by default (see Update below. This is good, because, although I like AbiWord and it is fast and lightweight, it is not as compatible with the Word .doc format as Open Office is. I have a rather complicated template I use to test Word compatibility, which is important to my work, and AbiWord could not render it correctly, while Open Office did. But for everyday writing where I don't need Word compatibility, I prefer AbiWord.
Other applications include Gnumeric for spreadsheets, which did a good job with Excel spreadsheets, including Excel 2007 support. Mozilla Thunderbird (it's from the same folks that gave us the Firefox web browser) is the default email client. This didn't' bother me in the least, because I use it in Ubuntu. It has one of the best spam filters on the planet, and it's lightweight. The latest version of Firefox (3.5.4) is the default web browser. It includes a new look and a convenient button for adding new tabs. It's also faster than previous versions of Firefox.
Gimp is the image editing program -- I've always considered it to be bloated but performance is acceptable given the platform I was running on. The Xubuntu developers decided not to go with Empathy as the IM client as Ubuntu did, and Xubuntu still uses PIdgin, which is an excellent multi-protocol IM client. It supports video chat as well. You can still install Empathy if you want it, using Applications > Add/Remove Applications.
Multimedia support is provided by Brasero disc burner, Exaile Music Player and Movie Player for DVDs and web movies. These are all excellent applications, and ran well even on my minimal hardware setup. The new Ubuntu One client for the Ubuntu One file sharing service is available in Add/Remove Applications, but is not installed by default. See this article for more info about Ubuntu One.
Networking The Thunar file manager, which is excellent for browing and manipulating the local filesystem, doesn't provide network support (see Udate below). Xubuntu provides two programs for dealing with networks -- Remote Filesystems (Gigolo is the actual program name) and Shared Folders, both of which can be accessed from the Applications > System menu. I didn't care for Gigolo, as it does not inlcude discovery -- you have to add a connection for each remote shared folder. After reading a few reviews, I installed Gnome Commander and it discovered the Ubuntu and Windows PCs on my network without problem. Gnome Commander has a GUI similar to its namesake, and is lightweight, so that took care of my networking needs. I might add that after adding Samba and Linux file sharing, I had no problems seeing everything on my network. Performance As I've already mentioned Xubuntu more than lives up to its reputation of providing good performance on older hardware. I also installed it on an 1100MHz Celeron HP laptop with only 256MB (of which only 240MB is available to the operating system, and performance was less than acceptable than what I would consider for everyday use (This can be remedied - See Update below). Xubuntu DID run without problems though, and picked up the touchpad and PCMCIA wireless card and all other hardware as well. I can only conclude that you need a full 256MB or possibly 384MB or ram to get snappy performance with Xubuntu. I plan to bring the laptop up to 384MB or 512MB to find out. I also installed Xubuntu on my Compaq P4 2.6GHz machine with 1.25GB ram and it rocks! It's blazing fast. The Bottom LIne As I mentioned earlier, I was impressed with Xubuntu. The more I use it, the more I like it. I like it more than Ubuntu so far, and I've decided to switch to Xubuntu on my main machine as soon as I get another machine to run Ubuntu (I need an Ubuntu reference machine for the articles on this site). The Xubuntu developers have done a great job, and I would recommend you give it a try, even if you're not on older hardware. Bottom line is -- Xubuntu is an excellent operating system that is lightweight, fast and complete. I salute the developers for making this distro available. Update - 11/10/09 I had asked for feedback on this review from the Xubuntu users list , and Steve Dodier, one of the Xubuntu developers responded with some corrections and additional comments. I made corrections where appropriate in the article, and some of his comments are given below: *OpenOffice.org is installed by default due to a last second bug we didn't have the time to fix: the language packages seem to have been badly packaged and to be pulling the whole OpenOffice.org suite. Yay... * Thunar should get network support for sftp/smb/ftp in XFCE 4.8 (well, if it's ready by then, but I'm pretty optimistic – thanks to Jannis Pohlmann's work for that)! * Xubuntu requires 256 MB to run decently, but with some tweaking and if you disable some daemons in Applications -> Settings -> Session & Boot (or something similar.. :p), then AutoStart tab, and if you disable useless services in Applications -> System -> Services, you can get it to run on 128MB RAM hardware with a fair amount of swap, too. You'll very likely need the AlternateCD to install though, for any machine under 192MB ram. * I would also like to note that all multimedia related questions (codecs by default, flash, etc) have to respect a rule: Ubuntu requires that the software on the CD is free and can be legally shipped to restrictive countries such as the USA and Japan, so it's the reason why they're not installed by default on any Ubuntu CD. What's next? If you have a question or opinion, please feel free to leave a comment below. For more Ubuntu help, visit our forums or subscribe to our RSS feed.
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 10 November 2009 09:37 ) |
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It runs fast and pretty on my 5-year-old Dell Dimension and even fixed a video problem I had given up on in Ubuntu Jaunty.
My only complaint was that Exaile didn't play MP3s "out of the box," but that was solved in seconds by simply installing Xubuntu-restricted extras with a single command.
I had experimented with LXDE before in Ubuntu and found it annoying and buggy (but I still like the PCManFM file manager better than Thunar), Bare-bones Xfce-4 was stark and unintuitive on top of Ubuntu, but in Xubuntu it's breezy and simple. What the developers did to make Xfce so nice, it's great! It's nice to have such a pretty ready-made distro with all the power of Ubuntu that runs very fast and trouble-free on my old Dell.
My only complaint is that as upt...