Netbooks are quickly gaining popularity among computer users the world over. Their small footprint, long battery life, cheap price and ease of use make them ideal for carrying around town, to and from school, at work and even during travel. Pretty much all major computer vendors now sell a netbook of some sort, from Dell to HP to Lenovo and many others, and they continue to gain a strong foothold in the portable computing world.
Netbooks are generally light weight, general purpose machines. They use smaller, slower processors (the Intel Atom seems to be the most popular, IMO), many use solid state drives instead of traditional spinning platters, and most definitely do not come with optical drives (CD/DVD drives). They usually ship with Windows XP (Just when Microsoft thought that they could kill off XP, here comes the netbook) and more and more, you can buy them pre-loaded with Linux.
I have a Lenovo S-10. The original S-10, that is. Complete with a 1.6GHz Atom processor, upgraded to 1.5GB RAM, and a 160GB hard disk. My little Lenovo comes with a Broadcom 5709 copper NIC as well as a 43XX based wireless NIC, built in web-cam, sound card, and the other typical things that come on all computers, including an external VGA port. And naturally, I run Linux on it too.
I still have Windows XP installed, as it is the easiest way to do some things, like updating/syncing my Blackberry, but mostly, it's still there for the occasions my wife decides she'd like to surf the internet and check e-mail while watching DVR'd episodes of bad television shows :-)
My primary Netbook OS is a distribution called #!Crunchbang. Crunchbang is based on Ubuntu, albeit stripped down and re-spun with OpenBox for a window manager, and few applications (though you do have full access to the various apt repos). The latest stable Crunchbang release is based on Ubuntu 9.10 and runs very, very well. In fact, in all my attempts, it's installed from USB key flawlessly every time, and everything I use just works.
I've got a custom Conky script that displays some important system info in the background, Firefox 3.5, IRC, Pidgin, and other programs I use. I even have a nice background image of what the Zombie Apocalypse may look like.
However, I've also been playing with other Linux distros on the S-10. For now, I have a fully installed and working version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Ubuntu's re-spin built specially for low-power, smaller systems. UNR is designed with some things that, after I finally started using it made me think, "Why didn't anyone else do this".
The biggest difference is in the Gnome desktop. Yes, they are still using Gnome, which is a bit bigger than other smaller window managers, but their default configuration does something that I've not seen on other systems. It gives a simple menu to the left allowing you to launch various applications and tools. Then, it opens EVERYTHING full screen. Simple. Full Screen.
In Crunchbang, I have multiple live desktops, and usually work just as I do on systems with much larger displays. But let's face it, on a 10" LCD, there is only so much room, and not much for multiple windows. And I generally tend to maximize things myself and alt-tab through them when I need to switch to a different app.
UNR takes care of that from the start, opening things maximized for my display, and they look good.
Another thing that UNR does well is look very pretty. The UI is nicely polished, the icons all look good, the minimal eye-candy I run looks nice and doesn't kill my system, and the default color scheme is pleasing. It sees my drives and USB devices, and while it does NOT auto-mount my USB keys by default, I've yet to run into an instance where UNR did not see them, and allow me the means to mount them.
It comes with a nice selection of software, and just like Crunchbang, it has full access to the various apt repos, so you could install anything in the Universe via apt, or Synaptic, or even dpkg if you're feeling old school or eschew GUI tools.
Now, one thing that Crunchbang DOES do that UNR does not right out of the box is wireless networking. This applies to the Lenovo IdeaPad netbooks and any other Netbooks running Broadcom Wireless cards. This is partly a design choice in UNR. The proprietary drivers are there, and can be installed, but you have to explicitly choose to install them over the Open Source drivers, where as in Crunchbang, the proprietary drivers are installed by default.
Really, this is not a failing of either distro, but I have seen where some potential Ubuntu netbook users were turned off by the leaps they have to take in some cases to get Broadcom wireless working. In my own experience, I tried for several hours this weekend getting the wl driver installed, only to finally decide I'd done enough tweaking and needed a fresh baseline install to start over. However, on my second install, I was able to successfully install the Broadcom STA driver (wl.ko) via the hardware-drivers tool.
From there, a simple reboot and wireless worked like a champ.
So there are two possibilities for Netbook Linux Operating systems. #!Crunchbang and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I've been looking at others to play with, and will soon. I need to find a non-Ubuntu based one to try for comparison though. I've read that Fedora works, but I also have been looking at OpenBSD and Slax (based on Slackware). My first Linux experience so many years ago was on Slackware, meticulously downloaded via 2400bps modem from USENET, so maybe I'll go there first, for old times sake.
In any case, there are many Netbook specific distributions out there, and the number is growing daily. The nice thing about them is that they are small, mostly fast, and can be run directly from USB drives without installing. Couple this with an encrypted filesystem, tor and other privacy features and you've got a nice setup for a small, portable private browsing system that would let you surf in security from anywhere. At the very least, you've now got easy means to play with various Linux distributions to your heart's content.
Happy Hacking...
Das Aggregator!