Netbook upgrades

Yesterday I upgraded two Netbook computers. The first is my Asus Eee PC 900 which I have had for about a year. The second is an HP 2133 Mini Note (KX872AA) which a good friend donated to us as they found they could not get on with the included Suse Enterprise Linux.

Our plan is to give one to our youngest son who has been told that due to dyslexia he will be able to use a laptop at school for some lessons.

After a spot of googling I was a bit worried about the HP, Ubuntu only offers tier 3 support for it. On the other hand there plenty of options for the Eee PC. In the end I decided to try The Ubuntu Netbook Remix (abbreviated to UNR). Second runner was EasyPeasy Linux, but as that is based on Ubuntu 8.04 rather than 9.04 I decided to try UNR first.

WOW!

An incredibly easy install. It is a while since I have installed a desktop operating system and so much has changed. It was incredibly easy and straightforward. Absolutely fantastic, almost no questions to ask and everything worked out of the box. I installed from a memory stick prepared on a windows XP laptop and it just worked.

On both Netbooks the screen was correctly identified and worked at full resolution from the start.

On both the wireless network adaptor was detedcted and worked immediately, the home wireless was found, I just had to type in the passphrase and I was away (well I did have to add the MAC address to the list of allowed computers on the firewall and WiFi hub, but that is true for any machine running any operating system).

Then I got another nice surprise when I plugged in my USB mobile internet dongle (from 3), it found it, asked if I wanted to connect and then got a connection first time. What is more I pulled it out and then put it back in and it worked again. No settings, no magic just worked.

However, I did find the fancy netbook desktop interface very sow on both machines but switching to the classic Ubuntu interface (which everyone here is used to) solved the speed problem completely.

I have also installed the just released FireFox 3.5 to benefit from the speed increase.

So if you have a netbook I personally recommend Ubuntu Netbook Remix - fantastic!!!

Looks like our son will have the Asus - no hard disk (more robust) and smaller/lighter (especially the power supply).

Meanwhile I am using the MiniNote to write this and it is very nice (like the keyboard and screen especially).

Comments

[Rachel]

Interesting Dave, have just given our seven year old daughter an acer netbook for her seventh birthday - it's pink! What more can I say! (Mummy's is a white one) (Linux Lite) We're all Ubuntu converts at this end and have very little to do with Windows. I like the ubuntu philosophy, somehow it has more integrity.

[Dave]

"More integrity" as in lots and lots of integrity compared to almost none (abuse of monopoly, treatment of so called "temporary staff" being just two examples)

Oh and windows is unstable, and is not secure (Vista better except a lot of the security actually exists to enforce DRM).

Interesting to see how much faster my netbook boots compared to my windows laptop.