Canonical has announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.10 alpha 6, the final alpha release before the transition to beta testing. Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, introduces a number of important architectural improvements and also improves boot performance, especially on computers with solid state hard drives.
Earlier this year, Canonical revealed plans to significantly optimize boot performance. It aims to deliver 10-second startups for the Ubuntu 10.04 release, which is due in 2010. In the latest Karmic alpha, the team has already taken some important steps toward achieving this goal. Their roadmap indicates that 25 seconds is the target for Karmic, and the reference device used to benchmark progress is the Dell Mini 9 netbook. We did some testing of our own to see how the OS is coming along.
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I’d like to see the monopoly owning companies competing with that 😀 w00h00.
My Macbook boots OS X 10.5.5 in about 5 seconds with and SSD.
integrated mouse pad takes some time to get used to but very accurate. Has three USB ports on the sides and the back area houses the six cell battery (no ports or jacks there). The built-in 802.11n wireless works perfectly every time the system is turned on. Have not yet tried the Bluetooth feature. Even though intended as a Net-Top, the True Life SRS Premium Sound is great for such a small device. I even loaded my music and movie collection of more than 30GBs.
Factory settings to preserve battery life have the screen luminescence set to 50% but can easily be adjusted to the necessary ambience illumination you may need. Regarding battery duration I cannot comment on its purpose since whenever I am doing word processing tasks, have always music or videos running. And using the two USB port external ASUS disk drive, battery life decreases to only two hours. But, Asus includes a mini charger.
Having stated all this, the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA is perhaps the best bang for your buck at thi