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Earlier this month, we spoke with Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical, about the upcoming Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a specialized version of Ubuntu aimed squarely at the mini-notebook market. In the interview, Carr said that Ubuntu Netbook Remix would have a boot time of 5 to 10 seconds, but it appears that may have been in error. Carr contacted us this morning with this statement:

In our interview, I inadvertently gave you some misleading information with regard to potential boot times in upcoming Netbook products running the Ubuntu Netbook Remix or derivatives of it. I spoke about 5–10 second boot times, which is way off what we are seeing right now and was based on a misinterpretation of some data I saw in a very early spec for these category of machines. In short, I was plain wrong and we don’t want to set expectations we are ultimately going to disappoint in market.

We are working very hard to reduce the boot times we are currently seeing, which we think are too long. Right now we can’t give accurate estimates but it will be longer then 5–10 seconds for sure. When we have more accurate estimates, I will be happy to share it with you and your readers.

So there you have it folks: the real deal on Ubuntu Netbook Remix’s boot time. Much thanks to Gerry Carr for clearing up the situation.

Timed perfectly with the deluge of mini-notebook news coming out of Computex, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced its new operating system: Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Set to arrive preinstalled on mini-notebooks later this year, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix will feature some of our open-source faves such as Firefox 3, Thunderbird, Pidgin, OpenOffice, Rhythmbox, FBReader, Lifrea, and F-spot.

We sat down for a conversation with Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical, to discuss the new Atom-powered OS that’s designed to make Ubuntu the face of the mini-notebook space.

What is Ubuntu Netbook Remix and how does it differ from other Linux distributions?
It’s not a distribution. Those are products with daily builds for end users to get the ISO and put on any PC. This isn’t. We’re calling it a remix, so basically it takes the core elements built into the desktop edition and it’s optimized for the Intel Atom processor. It’s built for small-factor machines and is fast-on, fast-off. It’s all about getting on the Web quickly, as that’s the primary user experience on these machines. It’s built equally for touch as it is for mass driven.

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