Netbooks?

[ShadesFox]

I fear that my laptop maybe on it's last legs and have been shopping around for new machines.  I know that last year when I was at Anthrocon more then a few people had netbooks so I thought I would ask here for opinions.  Do you have one, which one, do you like it?

The main things I'm eyeing now is the Dell Mini 9.  Looks dirt cheap and as long as I can get my ssh shell I'm golden.  Though this thing looks interesting, https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ .  I just prefer that something actually exist before I buy into it X3.

So, thoughts/opinions on the subject?

[Tapewolf]

I've got an EeePC 701 4G.  It has its ups and downs.  The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to, but size-wise it's about right.  It will fit in some coat pockets.

The charger is lovely in that resembles a phone charger rather than a conventional brick, and the UK version has the 3-pin thing as an attachment over the US 2-prong thing.  This means that when I take it to the US I can remove it and plug it straight into the wall without needing an adaptor.  Less of a worry for you.

4GB in mine is a bit of a limitation - it means that you can't easily make it go into suspension, and most OSes take an aeon to boot.

The original shipped OS boots into the GUI in about 10-15 seconds from hitting the power button, but the shell is godawful.  If you customise the thing so it goes into KDE instead, it takes longer but is still the quickest boot.

If you're interested, the OS timings I had were as follows.  This is timed from pressing the power switch through to the desktop appearing:

Xandros: 45s
EasyPeasy: 1m40s
Mandriva: 1:21
Debian: 1:20 (after a lot of optimisation - it originally took about 1:50)
Xubuntu: 1:11
CrunchEee Linux: 0:59

I settled on CrunchEee.  It has a few quirks and stupidities, but it's quick to come up and it has a decent package selection which Xandros does not.

If it were me, I'd look for a machine with SSD instead of a hard disk.  It's smaller, but once you reach about 8-12GB it covers most of what you'd need for a machine of this purpose.  You can plug in an HDD via USB anyway.

I'm also hoping to get a Pandora, but that has been delayed.  Again.

That ARM touchbook thing looks neat.  You won't be able to run Flash on it, though.  If you're looking for something exotic and Windows-proof, the Elonex One is a MIPS machine.  Very cheap, but again, no Youtube for you.

[Jack McSlay]

and with 701 you can buy a touchscreen for it if you want

also worth noting, choosing a 9" machine instead of a 7" one of the same line likely means shorter battery life

4GB in mine is a bit of a limitation - it means that you can't easily make it go into suspension, and most OSes take an aeon to boot.

you could just expand it with a 16GB SD card, or be a bit more drastic like those soldering 32GB pendrives inside it

[Tapewolf]

you could just expand it with a 16GB SD card

You could... but then the kernel would panic when you wanted to upload the photos from your camera.

or be a bit more drastic like those soldering 32GB pendrives inside it

Mine has the mini-PCI slot removed.  Some people have reinstated theirs, and if mine had had one, I'd have upgraded it that way.

Note that NW Airlines asked me last year if any of my equipment was modified or repaired - I imagine that if you obviously hotrodded the thing they might not let you fly with it.


**EDIT**
I just read the Q/A about that touchbook - they seem to have got Youtube to work on it somehow.  Probably they're doing the same kind of trick as the iPhone, i.e. pulling the videos directly from the site.

Either that or their OS has licensed the ARM version of flash as used in the Nokia N810 mini-tablet thing.  If the Pandora goes belly-up I'll probably get one of those instead.

[Zorro]

Walmart Acer Aspire One with a conventional 160 GB Hard Drive for less than $350.

I love this thing and you can just load regular programs on it and use it like a shrunk regular Laptop.

Not going to be running Second Life on it but other than that I love this thing.  Almost never use my full sized laptop now because of how damn portable this thing is.


http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10810493

[ShadesFox]

I just read the Q/A about that touchbook - they seem to have got Youtube to work on it somehow.  Probably they're doing the same kind of trick as the iPhone, i.e. pulling the videos directly from the site.

Either that or their OS has licensed the ARM version of flash as used in the Nokia N810 mini-tablet thing.  If the Pandora goes belly-up I'll probably get one of those instead.

Unsure of how they get youtube working.  Maybe they use gnash?  I am sorely tempted to preorder one.  I think it could be shiny.

and with 701 you can buy a touchscreen for it if you want

also worth noting, choosing a 9" machine instead of a 7" one of the same line likely means shorter battery life

While true, I think I would go batshit if I tried using a 7" computer.

Walmart Acer Aspire One with a conventional 160 GB Hard Drive for less than $350.

I love this thing and you can just load regular programs on it and use it like a shrunk regular Laptop.

Not going to be running Second Life on it but other than that I love this thing.  Almost never use my full sized laptop now because of how damn portable this thing is.


http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10810493

Yes, well the ARM chip, while it does not run most 'regular' programs, does make the netbook last much longer.  I'm willing to make that tradeoff.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I should point out - my debian install, somewhat stripped (I'm thinking about further things I can do to make it faster - udev is currently the biggest hog of the boot process) boots on my eeepc 701 in about 50 seconds or so.

That's power-on to logged in at the desktop. I have it configured for auto-login, and I can list some of the other things I've done if you're interested...

[Tapewolf]

I should point out - my debian install, somewhat stripped (I'm thinking about further things I can do to make it faster - udev is currently the biggest hog of the boot process) boots on my eeepc 701 in about 50 seconds or so.

That's power-on to logged in at the desktop. I have it configured for auto-login, and I can list some of the other things I've done if you're interested...

I would be interested to know how you achieved that, yes, though I'm reluctant to try Debian again.  It has always been an utter bitch to configure and when it is configured, it has never worked out well for me.  I do not see it working out well for the foreseeable future.

Someone needs to take those people aside and explain to them the concept of "user friendliness" as opposed to "user hostility".  Case in point, the error message if you mis-type the password for sudo says that you do not have access and the incident will be reported.  The sheer arrogance of that statement alone is something I find deeply offensive.  If I wanted the OS to be Big fucking Brother I would have installed Windows.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

... that's hard-coded into sudo, though. If they wanted to change that, they'd have to patch the package.

And how do you tell the difference between a mistype, and someone deliberately attempting to guess?


On the other points, I've found debian to be just right - not too helpful, and limiting what I can do thereby (like ubuntu does) and not hostile at all. Mind you, I moved to debian from slackware, so I'm probably not the best person to ask about user-friendlyness...


In terms of how I achieved it? I've left syslog and cron on there, apparently I could get another few seconds out of that. I removed nfs-common and portmap, because I don't use nfs - or samba, for that matter - and I set all the network settings to manual startup. Other than that, I mostly followed the list provided in the debian eeepc wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/BootProcessSpeedup and http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Boot and some of http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/TipsAndTricks

By far the biggest jump was parallelising the boot scripts, though. I've heard of speeding it up further by pre-packaging some of the udev stuff, and extracting a tarball on boot, but I'm not sure I want to go to that effort for another 10 seconds or so.  I should check how long it takes now, but it's certainly not long enough to be troublesome.

[Tapewolf]

... that's hard-coded into sudo, though. If they wanted to change that, they'd have to patch the package.

Debian is the only OS I've ever seen do that.  Solaris didn't when I forgot I wasn't on one of my own machines.  MacOS doesn't do that.  Ubuntu doesn't do that and I don't remember the Redhats ever doing that either.

And how do you tell the difference between a mistype, and someone deliberately attempting to guess?

Frequency?  Someone who's guessing is liable to do it more than once in a short space of time.

On the other points, I've found debian to be just right - not too helpful, and limiting what I can do thereby (like ubuntu does) and not hostile at all. Mind you, I moved to debian from slackware, so I'm probably not the best person to ask about user-friendlyness...

Very true.

In terms of how I achieved it? I've left syslog and cron on there, apparently I could get another few seconds out of that. I removed nfs-common and portmap, because I don't use nfs - or samba, for that matter - and I set all the network settings to manual startup. Other than that, I mostly followed the list provided in the debian eeepc wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/BootProcessSpeedup and http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Boot and some of http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/TipsAndTricks

I believe I did go through much of that, except for the Boot process speedup which I didn't see at the time and doesn't actually seem to exist anyway.  I think the big difference is that I did a standard install and tried to pare it down, whereas I think you said you did a minimal install and tried to build it up.

By far the biggest jump was parallelising the boot scripts, though. I've heard of speeding it up further by pre-packaging some of the udev stuff, and extracting a tarball on boot, but I'm not sure I want to go to that effort for another 10 seconds or so.  I should check how long it takes now, but it's certainly not long enough to be troublesome.

I've tried to make them run in parallel before - what I haven't done is attempted to change the order of them though, because I haven't studied the boot process enough to feel qualified to do that.  Which is probably the most important part.

[Faerie Alex]

After my old laptop broke (though it's still in the shop ), I went and bought an EeePC 1000. It's a bit more expensive than the 700 family, but a bit larger too. The keyboard claims to be 92% sized. It's biggest issue there would have to be its odd right shift key. (Though that's not a problem if you hen-peck like me. ) My personal biggest issue with it has been trying to install anything-it requires you either give it the right directory, or manually download either a Debian or Asus install package. It also refuses to update anything until its directories are updated. Could just be that I'm too new to Linux though.

[Lysander]

I don't know as much about computers as I'd like to so all I can really type is what I have.

I use a Compaq presario CQ50. It works wonderfully with everything I need it to. It has a 100 gb. HDD, HD DVD player, Windows Vista, and can play any program quickly and smoothly aside from the game Ys Origin (I have no idea what could play that game at it's highest settings with no slowdown).   

[Tapewolf]

I use a Compaq presario CQ50. It works wonderfully with everything I need it to.

It looks like you'd have trouble fitting it in your pocket, though.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

... that's hard-coded into sudo, though. If they wanted to change that, they'd have to patch the package.

Debian is the only OS I've ever seen do that.  Solaris didn't when I forgot I wasn't on one of my own machines.  MacOS doesn't do that.  Ubuntu doesn't do that and I don't remember the Redhats ever doing that either.

I thought both slackware and redhat does it. I'm pretty sure I saw Solaris do something similar, although mostly I use su instead of sudo, so I could well be wrong.

In terms of how I achieved it? I've left syslog and cron on there, apparently I could get another few seconds out of that. I removed nfs-common and portmap, because I don't use nfs - or samba, for that matter - and I set all the network settings to manual startup. Other than that, I mostly followed the list provided in the debian eeepc wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/BootProcessSpeedup and http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Boot and some of http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/TipsAndTricks

I believe I did go through much of that, except for the Boot process speedup which I didn't see at the time and doesn't actually seem to exist anyway.  I think the big difference is that I did a standard install and tried to pare it down, whereas I think you said you did a minimal install and tried to build it up.

That's probably it. I've also used the lxde package set, although I don't recall that doing more than a second or two in loadup time - the major difference is in screen real estate and setup (I haven't found a decent battery applet that works on lxde without installing all of gnome...)

I've tried to make them run in parallel before - what I haven't done is attempted to change the order of them though, because I haven't studied the boot process enough to feel qualified to do that.  Which is probably the most important part.

I haven't changed the order of them at all. I just went "load the parallel stuff, fix the things that need it to make it work, and make it go" level stuff. That seemed to work out ok.


This is, however a trifle far afield from the original question, though. ;-]

[Reese Tora]

I picked up the 901 that comes with linux a while ago, and I've been using it exclusively this past week.  the keyboard I'm pretty much adapted to, and it's been working pretty well for me for just the web surfing and chatting that I've been doing.

Thus far, the only things I've done is a few mods within IceWM to turn on the start menu.  This model has screen that's the full size of the case at 9" or so, and the price dropped down to the $400 range about a month after I bought mine at $600.  I haven't timed it, but I think I'm getting at least 5 hours of use out of the battery with wifi on, speakers off, default brightness in the auto power saving processor mode.

[Siirenia]

While true, I think I would go batshit if I tried using a 7" computer.

You make it sound as if you aren't batshit already~