12.04 and the CR-48
Well, turns out that I'm not getting 12.04 installed on the CR-48. It wants to use a partition map that the bios doesn't like. That's a shame, I wanted to test it out…
I'm going to keep trying. I'll push an update if I get something working.
Update 29 April 2012 at 9:04
Last night I couldn't get the installer to use a different hard drive format, which lead me to give up for the night.
In a second effort to install 12.04 LTS on the CR-48, I've decided to take the longer route to installing 12.04, starting with a 10.04.4 release, and upgrading to 12.04 from that. My thinking is that it won't reformat the drive, meaning I'll have something to work with.
I've got 10.04.4 installed, it's currently installing the 73 updates from between when 10.04.4 was released and now. After that's done (in what appears to be anywhere from ten minutes to 19.66 hours, depending on when I look over), I'll try upgrading to 12.04 LTS.
I never really addressed why I'm doing this. Partially because I want to try out 12.04 for a week on a secondary machine, and partially because I want to see if Unity and Ubuntu really is faster than four months ago.
Just a couple months after making the switch, and trying out Ubuntu again, I realized just how slow Unity is. It's horrible. Even Cinnamon and Shell on Ubuntu are faster. That's one of the things that further solidified my position on Arch, and suggesting Linux Mint for beginners. If 12.04 is sufficiently faster (to the point where it performs at the same speed as Arch with Gnome Shell), it may take it's former spot back from Mint.
Unity is definitely nicer to look at than Cinnamon, but because of it's previous speed issues, it's really lost out.
Alternatively, if the classic session I've heard about looks nice and is speedy, it could also knock down Mint.
Update 30 April 2012 Midnight-Thirty
It's all working, I've even started some setup. The only issue I had was that
the global menu didn't install (which seems really odd to me), but it was only a
sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt indicator-appmenu && restart lightdm
away.
As for my initial thoughts (I'll be posting a full review later, probably tomorrow, or Wednesday…), Unity is a lot faster than before. Everything about it is faster. The only slow thing is the Ubuntu Software Center, but it's always been slow.
Even LibreOffice, which used to take five to six seconds to even give me the splash screen is popping up right when I click it. I like this, I like it a lot.
Updated 5 May 2012