XUBUNTU 9.04 = XFCE ultimatum.

I have to say that the title of this post is easily justified by the new XFCE 4.6.1 based xubuntu 9.04.

It does what it is meant to do. Its fast, light, clean and efficient.

 

 

"Minimum system requirements:

You need 192 MB RAM to run the Live CD or 128 MB RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only requires you to have 64 MB RAM at install time. To install Xubuntu, you need 1.5 GB of free space on your hard disk. Once installed, Xubuntu can run with starting from 192 (or even just 128) MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least 256 MB RAM."

 

From the above quote from the Xubuntu website, we can see the lightness of Xubuntu desktop. I decided to look into it. I tried the live cd and it itself is fast. Impressed by the speed I went on to installing it. I tried some modifications by installing compiz and it was a blast. The transparency, the wobbly windows and other animations were simply marvelous. It started to look like KDE. Thunar is fast and stable; the thumbnail generation is speedy and efficient. There were also some glitches in installing compiz so I recommend to go with normal settings for the intended lightness.

 

Major gripe with Xubuntu is that you have to manually mount NTFS drives and place shortcuts for them. After mounting they don't appear in places, we have to place a shortcut for the mount folder ourselves and include it in places. This was really idiotic. They include native support for NTFS drives and they don't include auto mount option or even a GUI mounting option. This was the case in Mandriva too. There the normal mounting makes the drives read-only drives. I entered auto mount option in fstab and made it to mount at boot. But that didn't work either. I had to type in the terminal and mount as root. Other than this there are no other minuses in Xubuntu and it works as a breeze.

 

The new login window, bootsplash and themes are a treat to the eye and surprising. For a light environment they include nice logins. Overall this is a very fast variant of Ubuntu for running in thin clients and low resource and a decade old PCs. Others can just go to Ubuntu and cut the hassle.

 

My Rating:

 

v Speed :              5/5;

v Stability :       5/5;

v Looks:                5/5;

v Features:         4/5; (open office would have been better)

v Usability:       3/5; (Manual mounting Sucks)

v overall:            4.4/5; (Really good)

 

 

Screenshots:

(I borrowed some)