EasyPeasy

EasyPeasy 2.0 Alpha is built off Ubuntu 12.04. New features include

• Gnome Shell as the default user interface
• LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice
• Better support for iPhone - users can mount the iPhone’s documents directory now
• All software is updated

Please remember that this is an alpha release and is not stable.

	Download EasyPeasy 2.0
	Download the installer for Windows, Ubuntu / Linux or Mac
	Use the installer to move EasyPeasy to an memory stick
	Put the memory stick into your netbook and install
	Have fun with EasyPeasy 2.0!

This is one of a regular series of posts on netbook experience updates. Look for the category This week in netbooks and subscribe to the series.

That isn’t totally true: This is the first post, in a soon to be, series of posts on netbook experience. A couple of our users have suggested that write updates on a regular basis, which is a great idea.

Testing Unity

Unity is an application developed by Canonical for netbooks. Today it’s just the application, but it looks as they will release it as it’s own version in addition to Ubuntu Netbook. As we’re all in the business of open source, we’ve been testing it for some time now as a potential idea for EasyPeasy.

Searching has been made easily available on the top left. This is a nice feature. I’m not sure about the taskbar on the left hand side though. Geeks, including myself, have been moving the taskbar to the left  for years as it’s the logical place for it: you navigate web sites vertically so vertically is where you need space. No operating system has this as default though and there’s good reasons for it. One being that it’s not usual, meaning it’s not intuitive. The other one being that it’s ugly.

All in all it’s an exiting project which I’m looking forward to see grow. If you’ve tried it, what are your thoughts?

Release schedule for EasyPeasy 1.7

The release schedule for EasyPeasy 1.7 is now available on our wiki. We plan on swaping 1.6 out with 1.7 on November 4th this year. The first version will be available already in about 2 weeks.

Features

Download

Upgrade

We are hard at work making upgrade from 1.5 possible

EasyPeasy 1.6 is finally more or less complete. Even though it’s not ready for download, I’m updating you like this because I promised to do so. What’s left to do is updating to the latest linux kernel (which is what improves hardware support and battery life) released later today. Also, it’s a little big (830 mb download) so I will work at slimming it down.

What you’re seeing here is based on the, not yet released, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. We’re keeping the great artwork by Lasse and Mark and have changed the default theme to Ambiant. This theme gives us a sleek monocrome looking top panel. There are also changes to the desktop launcher which now slides through your installed applications. Pidgin Messenger has been swapped out with Empathy. The Empathy team has the same mission as us – to make it work out of the box: Chatting, sharing, remote desktop connection etc. all works without any configuration.

I’ve been sitting a lot at the same place developing this, so I thought I’d share a pic with our avid blog readers. This is my desk at home.

EasyPeasy gets coverage in the recent Ubuntu User issue. According to the article, “Is that a netbook in your pocket? Boot Up”, the EasyPeasy website was used for its introduction and start in investigation of netbook distributions. The pdf including coverage of EasyPeasy netbook OS can be found at Ubuntu-user.com.

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