Got a Netbook…

I am going to a conference soon, and my wife cannot part with her laptop now, so I bought a $300 Asus Eee-PC netbook (1005HAB), with a 9-cell battery that gives me close to 9 hrs of battery time.  I bought it online through Best Buy (I know, I know), and picked it up at the store a few days later.  I had Windows7 Starter Edition on it.  I prepped a USB drive using a the KDE Startup Disk Creator program and the Kubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition ISO.  I had to find the BIOS first (F2), and tell the netbook to boot from USB, but after that, Kubuntu Netbook installed without a hitch.  I chose to wipe everything, since the netbook came with the OS media (if I ever want to install Windows, yuck – but hey, I paid for it).  I set it up with separate partitions (including /boot) and formatted everything with EXT4 (for later conversion to btrfs when the 2.6.36 kernel comes out).

Everything worked right out of the box.  Including wireless and suspend-resume.  Sweet.  It is a little slow, but who cares?  This thing is so neat.  I am a little addicted to being able to go anywhere around the house now and surf, blog, email, and administer the other machines from this thing.  When I am done, I can close the lid, and later open it back up, wait a bit, and then be prompted to unlock the screen and get back online, no sweat.

In addition to updating the kernel to 2.6.35-17 and updating KDE to version 4.4.5, I also installed the MediBuntu repositories, set up the USB smartcard with Acrobat Reader, Firefox, and Thunderbird, and got the camera working with the new gmail video chat software.  One more thing – to get the function keys to work, I had to edit my /etc/default/grub file and change the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux"

I also installed “eee-control-tray” from the repositories for better control over the camera, touchpad, etc.  The only thing I do not like is the touchpad, in fact.  When scrolling on a web page, it likes to keep scrolling whenever I move it into the page to click on a a link.  I use a USB wireless mouse now.  We are taking this thing everywhere we go now.