The Droopy Eye

My hand me down IBM Thinkpad has been dying. I acquired the laptop when I bought my wife a new laptop for her birthday. She is happily chugging along on her Dell Inspiron. The old laptop had a dying cooling fan and was running a little slow. We have been running linux exclusively for about 5 years now and I thought I had it pretty well tuned, but when the fan started to go, I knew it was time for the wife to get a new one. Since I acquired it, the fan has been getting louder, and then, it stopped turning on at boot and kept the laptop from working reliably.

I normally use my desktop for most of my computing. I use a laptop for surfing the web or running programs on my desktop remotely. I don’t need much horsepower to accomplish that, so I decided to get a little netbook for myself. Since I wanted linux on it, I saw no reason to pay the Microsoft Tax for something with XP or Windows 7 on it. Dell has done a nice job of selling linux on their machines with the nice side benefit of corporate discounts.

I picked up the Dell Mini 10v for $299.00 plus tax, etc. The only complaint on the ordering process was that I had to wait about 2 weeks for it to get through production. Once it was ready, shipping was quick. It has one gigabyte of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, 10.1 inch screen, 1.3 megapixel webcam, Intel Atom processor, flash card reader, 3 USB ports, and a builtin WIFI card.

When it fired my new little baby up, I was greeted by a nice little set up wizard. Sadly, I wasn’t given the option to create a separate /home partition to allow my personal data and settings to survive a reinstall. That wasn’t great, but I know that I can resize the partitions and move my stuff to the new partition. I never got the chance to do that.

Once I got it setup, there was a nice, cool, and easy to use menu customized to work on the little screens of a netbook. It was looking pretty sharp. I went to Firefox to get online, and that’s when the problems started. I think most people know that Firefox comes with a builtin Google search box. Apparently Dell is playing the same games that they play with their Windows systems. Preinstalled and sponsored crapware! The first thing that popped up in Firefox was a prompt to install the Yahoo Toolbar. There was no option to avoid it. The install went along, and a 10 x10 pixel window popped up. Nothing was printed in it. Then a second box popped up. When I resized it, it said Firefox, but nothing else.

Dell was not 0 for 2 on a system intended for real computer users. The final straw was that they don’t ship any restore disk with the unit. More correctly, they ship a CD to restore their crapware, but they don’t include a CD drive on the unit. You have to copy the disk from another computer I guess.

Since I had to create a flash drive to restore from, I figure I would checkout something other than what Dell was shipping. I never did find their trialware gotchas, but I bet they are in there somewhere.

I downloaded and installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR 9.04) and wrote it to a flashdrive following the instructions off the Ubuntu site. Installation was smooth and painless. I was given the option to partition the way I wanted. Everything went nice. The only problem is the over documented brown interface. That is easy enough to replace. I actually prefer the full GNOME desktop to the netbook interface and was perfectly at home once I switched the Desktop Mode to GNOME.

The only problem I had was that the touchpad thing they use couldn’t drag and drop. The stupid thing has buttons built into the bottom of the touchpad. When you click on something and try to drag it, the focus seems to jump between the dragging finger and the button finger. It was virtually useless for this kind of stuff. After a little searching, I found the new driver was available with a simple download.

This little baby is humming along and gets abot 6 hours of use on the battery. It runs great. Dell can build nice machines, but their crapware has to go. Hopefully I will add some links and pictures to this soon.

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