I picked up a new netbook last night. It’s been over a year since I last looked at them so I knew almost nothing about current models. I wanted something lightweight with excellent battery life that would run Linux nicely to replace my MSI Wind U100. I also wanted it to be as cheap as possible.
It looked as though almost any current netbook with a 6 cell battery would do the trick. Happily the cheapest netbook I could find was also entirely lacking in glossy plastics so I walked out of the store the proud owner of a $340 Samsung NP145 Plus, whatever the heck that is.
A quick google showed that there were some issues with function keys and suspend on this model, but there were posts on getting it working and a PPA with drivers - I was resigned to putting a bit of work in but cautiously optimistic that I wouldn’t be running Windows on it long.
The process went something like:
- Install Xubuntu 11.10 from a USB key
- Notice that everything works except the backlight adjustment
- Notice that the backlight adjustment does work at the Grub bootloader
- Dredge up the append ‘acpi_backlight=vendor’ to the Grub boot line from memory
- Wait, what? That’s all ?
Suspend works. Sound works. Wireless works. It pretty much all just goes.
Despite having picked this model out entirely for being super cheap, it looks like I’ve lucked out. The keyboard feels great, the build quality is excellent and the battery life is amazing. Even better, it takes DDR3 so it has happily omnomnomed one of the spare 2GB DIMMs I had lying around from upgrading my Mac. It runs cool and quiet. The touchpad buttons have a really nice click to them. There are just so many more nice things I can say about this machine, which is absurd given my cellphone is worth more than two of these.
Xubuntu runs very well. I’ve moved away from Ubuntu for the same reason as everyone else I know - I really struggle with Unity. I don’t really want much from a desktop environment - a nice launcher (gnome-do), network-manager and a reasonable power management framework. Xubuntu is a nice place to be, with all of the Ubuntu packages just an apt-get away but without too much in the way of fuss and bother.
It also looks really pretty :)
