Xubuntu 11.10 and my Netbook

Michael Reed — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:32:47 +0000

October saw the release of the latest version of the Ubuntu family and that includes Xubuntu, the Xfce edition. I’ve just installed Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook and the experience was rather good.

The netbook in question is an eMachines (Acer) model eM350. The specs are: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive. I'd been using it for a couple of months with the default installation of Windows XP.

In this case, I installed Xubuntu by downloading the ISO as usual and using Unetbootlin to copy it to a flashdrive.

With each release, Xfce becomes more and more comprehensive. Xubuntu 11.10 uses Xfce 4.8 (covered here), and overall, the dark default Xubuntu theme looks attractive. As I've speculated in the past, I think that Xfce is going to become home to more and more users who want something that is under active development, yet looks and works like a Gnome 2, KDE 3 or even Windows XP desktop. In its default configuration, the task switcher, application launcher menu and status area are located on a bar at the top of screen. Moving the pointer to the bottom of the screen causes an icon-based application bar to appear, an efficient use of space on a netbook display as it retracts when not in use.

A layout that strikes a good balance between a traditional desktop and a space-constrained one.

As good as things looked initially, I began to notice a problem on the visual front: the font rendering looked rather blurry. Fortunately, a Google search turned up this neat little hack. Creating the two configuration files, as directed, altered the way that anti-aliasing is applied to fonts, giving them a crisp, smooth, if slightly heavy appearance. The default setup of the font rendering was so poor, that I honestly don't think I could have used it in that condition on a long term basis. Without the fix, text also had a misty quality when I installed Xubuntu within a VM on a desktop machine. I couldn't detect the same problem when I installed Ubuntu 11.10.

Xubuntu 11.10 installed in VirtualBox. Notice the misty quality of the Xubuntu text compared with the Kubuntu native rendering.

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blurry fonts

Xubuntu 11.10 and my Netbook