As previously announced, William Schaub has provided a new installer image derived from Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin), which is a long-term support release and will receive updates until April 2017 or later.

You can find out more regarding the key features of this version by visiting the following web page:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin ... ntuDesktop

In addition to a newer and more secure operating system core, this distribution also features a customized dock-centric user interface as well as more recent versions of essential applications (Firefox, for example). It retains key functionality of Genesi's official Maverick-based distribution such as hardware acceleration for video playback.

Please note that, while this release builts heavily on the work of current or former Genesi engineers, this is an experimental "community distribution" and will receive no official support from Genesi. If you have comments, questions or recommendations, please share them in this discussion thread.

Download: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/platforms ... /community

Installation:

• Unpack the .xz archive and write the unpacked .img file to an SD card.
• Make backups of any files on your Efika MX device that you would like to retain. (The installation will erase all data on your computer.)
• Insert the SD card in your Efika MX device and power it on / reboot.
• When asked, press the "Y" key on your keyboard to start the installation. (Depending on your keyboard layout, you may have to press whatever key is in the same position as the "Y" key on a US keyboard even if it has a different label.)

Just a note on the accelerated video play back. Some of the test files I used to test maverick (and the squeeze desktop images) do not play on this image. the gstreamer VPU plugin fails to initialize. it's not perfect but if it does decide to play and the audio also works chances are it will work just about as well as the maverick release. I wouldn't expect this to ever get fixed. although if markos gets everything into mainline and there is a way to get VPU working without closed freescale stuff there might be a chance down the road.

That said I plan on using this on my remaining working smartbook so that I might actually use it as more than a paperweight these days. I also run the same version of Ubuntu on my main computer so if I have time and there is a way to do any real enhancements (not VPU stuff that's far beyond me...) I might push and updated image in the future. no promises though.

Great work and nice looknfeel .

Thanks,

Mathieu

That's fine!
Many Thanks!

Next days I'll install it and I'll write a post about it to update friends about this new distro for efikamx.

_________________
http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

This is awesome!

I'd like a lot to switch to it or at least try it out. I myself still have this: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... f=7&t=2262 and it's actually still usable. I wonder if this new release works as well as that Debian image? If that's the case, I'm definitely switching.

Checking it out... Just two things:

1. Don't use Ubuntu software center. It's horribly slow. Just use apt-get from command line for both installing and updating things.

2. Is there any way to configure brightness?? The screen is quite noisy for me at default level and there is no brightness settting in "Brightness and lock". Previously I configured it with gnome-power-manager, but I can't find it here...

Just use the brightness keys hold down the fn key and press the one for brightness up or down.

I tried that, but it doesn't work. I also tried other key combinations such as Alt, Ctrl... I'm not sure why it doesn't do anything in my case. The keyboard appears to be working perfecty. At least other keys work... I can change volume with volume keys.

A small addition: I added "Luminosity" widget in dock and when I press the brigthness keys it changes the luminosity level in it... But that doesn't affect the screen's actual brigthness at all. Restarted the system - no changes. But at least the keys work and they are connnected to the widget.

Regarding the whole system - really it's a great change from the previous distributions. I think, discounting brigthness problem (which may affect only me), it has far superior functionality. The browser renders pages much faster and better than the old one in Debian. Overall it all works really fast and feels great.

Thanks so much for continous development!

The brightness keys do not work properly for me either so I can confirm the issue.

As for the Ubuntu Software Center, it works reasonably well once you move past the home screen. Unfortunately, the developers added a horribly inefficient fading effect to transition between different splash pictures near the top of the window. I recreated the effect in Firefox using plain HMTL5 and it ran quite a bit faster, which really says it all...

Lubuntu Software Center should be a great alternative in theory, but a straightforward installation does not appear to be enough to get it to work on a Smartbook. There appear to be database issues that prevent it from starting. Those would need to be investigated further.

Ok, the brightness issue may be something I had been working on that I had not gotten working yet. I may look at this when I get a spare moment and post a fix here. I doubt I will have much spare time any time soon though.

I also face some networking issue. It could go ~10K/s.
For Exemple, trying to clone linux, (git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git) is a real pain.

Any idea ?

Do you experience the same when you download a single large file instead? Based on my experience, SSD write access has always been a performance bottleneck with the Smartbook (relatively speaking). Perhaps the download speed only appears to be slow because writing many tiny files locally is a bit sluggish (especially if other processes happen to be simultaneously accessing the SSD).

Now testing 3G. Works magnificiently. Honestly, with this system the device is useful once again and faster than it was before. I'm a bit sad that this kind of system wasn't avaliable before.

Thank you again, wschaub.

is it possible to install this distro on headless smartbox ?

btw... i have mounted this image, /etc/issue file contains "Ubuntu 10.10", is it okay ?