Dell Mini 9 Ubuntu Update

I've been using the dell mini 9 for a month or so now and it's time to upgrade it to ubuntu 9. The rationale is:

• the dell ubuntu install is version 8 so it is old
• it uses the dell repositories so not many updates
• samba was broken on install, which is unforgivable as we have to coexist with windows

So time to update to 9. The question is how - we have the 9 cd and a usb dvd so we could go that route or we could do the notebook remix route and use the USB key method which is appealing.

First we get a torrent and download ubuntu-9.04-netbooks-remix-i386.img which is an image to be burned to a usb stick. Next, off to the package manager to install usb-imagewriter version 0.1.3 from the repository. We put in a 2 gig spare stick and run the program using:

Applications, Accessories, Image Writer

It returns an error 'no target devices found'. So it did not find a USB stick. We note the mounted stick does not have the orange usb symbol on it so we unmount it and plug it into another usb port. We check and this is listed as /dev/sdb

Re-running image writer works. It asks us for an image. We select the netbook-remix img file and start writing it to the usb stick.

Ok now that it is done put it in the dell mini and boot it on up. We first select the try option to see how it will look and if samba networking is fixed. Up it comes we click on networking and //megatron and //mothra show up immediately. We can't mount mothra shares so we try megatron. No joy here. Networking works as we can get to the internet but not to my local network. On the plus side this is running pretty fast off the usb stick.

Also not sure i like the desktop - it is designed like all the netbook OS with a bunch of icons cluttering up your space. This is supposed to be better? We do have an inspiron 910 img we could try as well as the stock ubuntu 9 cd. Let's try the CD first.

Ok we plug in a usb and boot to the liveCD mode and try to browse the network shares. The machines show up but unable to mount their shares to see them. Internet works but not the local network. So we might as well keep the machine as is and if time permits do some samba troubleshooting. This has always been a weakness of Linux, imho - osx works perfectly well with windows shares and it is a multi-vendor world. I don't like windows but we have to co-exist with it so it should just work.