Ubuntu Netbook Remix looks great

We somehow missed this in our gargantuan sub-notebook round-up, but Canonical officially announced their mini-notebook flavored version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, at yesterday's Computex Expo. Engadget has a gallery of screenshots, which is still wonderfully Ubuntu-esque while adding some of the brain-dead-easy program launching features of other flavors of Linux Lite. It looks great. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing Netbook Remix on any mini-notebooks for a while, although the timeline — "later in 2008" — is vague enough to be optimistic. Also unfortunate: as near as I can tell, it's OEM only, which may dash my hopes of downloading it and slapping it on a Wind.

Canonical Makes Ubuntu Notebook Remix official at Computex [Engadget]

[#1 posted by Enochrewt , June 3, 2008 9:57 AM]

Looks pretty sexy.

Sigh, I wish Ubuntu was just a little more hardware friendly, and they'd have a convert. And before you say anything, no, it's not.

[#2 posted by John Brownlee , June 3, 2008 10:14 AM]

I won't say anything: you're right!

[#3 posted by Darcy Casselman , June 3, 2008 10:59 AM]

Maybe I'm just hopelessly, naively idealistic, but I have a hard time believing an Ubuntu project would be "OEM only."

Okay, maybe it won't be officially released for everything, but there shouldn't be anything stopping people from picking it up and porting it to everything.

[#4 posted by Anonymous , June 3, 2008 12:07 PM]

I can believe this will be OEM only because this is the only department of Canonical that has any hopes of making money. They're paying pretty high for all the developers involved in this production and they even bought a mobile company, so at the very least they want to offset their development cost.

I don't think they'll object to anyone figuring this out themselves and working on it and plus with the GPL v2 license they have to give the source but I think it'll be pretty tightly integrated with the OEM vendors' hardware.

[#5 posted by Matthew Walton , June 3, 2008 11:30 PM]

It'll be freely available, that press release talking about OEMs is just targetting manufacturers who want to get hold of the software in a more traditional relationship with Canonical.

Then there's that bit at the bottom which says 'Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others' - not 'Ubuntu Desktop Edition' or 'all flavours of Ubuntu except this one'.

[#6 posted by Anonymous , June 4, 2008 6:26 AM]

It's available now - there's info at https://launchpad.net/netbook-remix

To install it on an eeepc you have to first install Ubuntu 8.04, but I'd imagine if the developers don't someone will make ready-made images for the eeepc and others soon.