

Ask HN: Netbook recommendations? - dawson

I'm thinking of getting a Samsung N210 (installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it), primarily for its awesome battery life but also because cnet gave it position one in their top ten netbooks. Only downside is, is that it doesn't have SSD. Does anyone have any experience with this netbook, or can recommend a better one? Thanks
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ZeroGravitas
I've got an NB30 running Ubuntu, which I think is a (slightly) ruggidized
version of the same laptop.

I'm very pleased with it overall. Battery life seems really good even though
I've selected the option to only charge to 80% to prolong battery life. It
looks good and feels solid.

I didn't bother with UNR, I just set the top and bottom panels to autohide,
and use Vimperator to browse which is very economical with vertical space. At
first I used full screen to eke out that last few pixels, but it's generally
not worth the bother. I might give UNR another go with Meerkat.

I'm trying to think of bad points. You need to hold down two keys to change
the volume (fn-arrow), the screen brightness doesn't auto-adjust to ambient
light. The touchpad doesn't have multitouch, but you can fake two finger click
and scroll, rather than use side-scroll. I used to hit the backslash button
when trying to use the right shift-key, but I got used to it soon enough.

You might want to check out this forum, for Linux on Samsung, that's were I
got some extra drivers for the function keys etc.

<http://www.voria.org/forum/>

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limmeau
I have an Intel Classmate PC, 3rd generation with convertible touchscreen. It
comes with a 16GB SSD (in my configuration) and runs Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04
(the latter with some touchscreen driver trouble I didn't bother to fix, but
others report success). Battery life five-ish hours, and pretty rugged. This
may be a better choice if: you predict dropping it a lot, or if you're longing
for a resistive touchscreen.

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dawson
or a Dell Mini 10v?

