UNR Jaunty (French) Mini 9

Oh, what a job I was asked to do, install Kubuntu 9.04 on a French Dell Mini 9; I could barely contain my excitement. I'm not a Kubuntu user, I much prefer Gnome over KDE, I speak only the most rudimentary French (although with a little help I recently explained to a contractor how I wanted our new French office cabled) and using an azerty keyboard makes my head and hands hurt.

Chris has recently gone through installing Kubuntu on a Mini 9 in another blog post. Tony's comments on that post, such as the problems connecting to wireless access points and the intrusiveness of KDE Wallet weren't things I wanted to reproduce myself on a tiny little screen. It's that kind of annoyance that made me ditch Kubuntu on my proper sized laptop some time back, there was no way I wanted to see that in miniature. And yes, I'll admit now, I've never installed and used KDE 4.2; I've had a brief play and have been shown its various merits and have had its technical superiority explained to me. Despite this, it still looks like it's going to get in my way, not like this lovely Gnome.

I'd been given my task however, install Kubuntu 9.04 on this little French computer.

A temporary fit of madness must have come over me whilst I perused the available downloads on ubuntu.com; before I could say what was going on I'd downloaded Ubuntu Netbook Remix and had installed usb-imagewriter on my full sized laptop. A quick bug report later and I had the image on a USB stick. I could perhaps file another bug - why does the shortcut to ImageWriter appear under Applications > Accessories whereas USB Startup Disk Creator appear under System > Administration? Couldn't these either appear in the same place or, preferably, be combined into a single application?

Installation is easy; as Chris describes you push 0 on boot, change the boot order, wait for the live image to load, click install, use the laptop until you're told that it's completed, restart and pull the USB stick out. Give that to a friend / colleague so that they can enjoy the UNR experience. Run a quick update and you're ready to go, even Firefox is installed by default!

Following Fabian Rodriguez's suggestion I installed the droid fonts (sudo apt-get install ttf-droid) and changed my settings to suit. I'm becoming a big Android fan, so having this little computer look even a little similar is a good thing. I also quickly installed openoffice.org-base and openoffice.org-sdbc-postgresql and connected to the database that my colleague is currently developing. Easy-peasy! As the French would say.

Ah yes, our friends the French... Coucou madame! So far I'd done all this whilst struggling with the azerty keyboard, however, all the menus, dialogues and applications remained in my native English. A quick trip to System > Administration > Language Support and I had downloaded the French language packs and chosen it as my defaults. I logged in and out again and was still in English, pig dogs, so I rebooted and found myself in a whole world of computing en francais.

I think I'll give this computer to one of our French staff now and ask them what they think of it. It doesn't mean too much to me any more...