The GUI released by HP for its Mini Mi netbook has been winning accolades for its high design standards. The interface offers pleasing shiny black eye candy that some sites are comparing to Apple design. The GUI provides an integrated starting point for many day-to-day tasks. You can search the web, visit your favorite bookmarks, and navigate through your applications (sorted by categories like Media, Work, and Play), all in a friendly task-oriented GUI. DownloadSquad writes that HP MediaStyle application looks a lot like Apple's FrontRow.

Admittedly, this comparison to Apple design is not universally accepted. For my tastes, the HP fonts are too thin, the icons too small, the layout less than optimal. Leaving criticisms aside, it cannot be denied the HP GUI offers a professionally put together presentation. You can decide for yourself whether that presentation stands apart from other Linux distros.

Over at the Ubuntu forums, users are installing the HP Mobile Experience Interface on various Ubuntu distributions. Since the full software restore package would not run on the hardware for most people, the challenge has been to extract just the critical GUI elements that people need. The theme in question is called "glassy-bleu", and to date has been installed onto many Ubuntu versions and any number of hardware platforms. Forum posters reported success on the EEE PC, Nokia 770, and even a Macbook Air under VMware.

A couple of posters named wildcard and rafaelcapanema have isolated a base set of .deb files. Compiled for "all" platforms, these files work on 386 and 64-bit distros. They have posted instructions on how to install these. Forum participants are reporting many successes on various platforms using these files.

If you're a Ubuntu user and are considering giving the theme a spin, make sure to check out the entire thread. Installation and use are not as clear-cut as you might hope and there is a real risk involved, particularly for users who are not experienced with these kinds of mods. You may have to do a little clean-up work on Open Office and a few other packages. But as one poster writes, " I love this new look!" and you may too.