As the new owner of a Dell Latitude 2100 netbook, I’m eager to get as much performance out of my little machine as possible.  One of the most pressing issues in my life over the last week, therefore, has been to decide whether to use the i386 or lpia build of Ubuntu on my new computer.  Here’s the decision I came to, and why.

More >

A build of the nouveau video driver for nVidia cards was included in the Ubuntu repositories beginning with Jaunty.  I’ve been meaning to test it for a while, and finally found some hardware recently to give it a shot.

More >

Improving boot time has been a focus of Ubuntu developers in recent releases, with the goal of a ten-second startup set for Ubuntu 10.4.  To test progress thus far, I compared boot performance for Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and 9.10.  Below are the results, which demonstrate the impressive strides that have been made thus far towards a faster boot.

More >

tuxradar.com has published a well-done series of benchmarking tests comparing Ubuntu Intrepid and Jaunty with Windows Vista and 7, both on 32- and 64-bit platforms.  The results suggest that–surprise–Windows 7 is not noticeably faster than Vista.  Moreover, it’s much slower than Ubuntu.

More >