November 01, 2009 - New Netbook

This morning I picked up a new netbook, a Toshiba Mini nb200. Spec wise it sports 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, an Intel GMA950 for graphics, and an Intel Atom N280 processor. This CPU is the same speed as an N270 (1.6GHz), but has a faster front-side bus at 667MHz. The screen is a bit bigger than the one on my 900A model Eee PC, though it still has the same resolution of 1024x600. Also, unlike my Eee PC, this one has a built-in web cam. The laptop itself is extremely slim, more so than my Eee PC even, and the battery is nice and fairly low-profile.

The keyboard layout is pretty interesting, and somewhat reminiscent of my old Toshiba Satellite. There are dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys on the right hand side, next to the arrow keys, and even dedicated Home and End keys at the very top. The tilde key, which is important in Linux when you spend as much time at the command line as I do, is in between the space bar and alt key. Some may find this annoying, but I actually like it. Otherwise, the keyboard is extremely comfortable and I can type full speed on it. As for the mouse pad, it feels smooth, responsive, and I can slide my finger on the side for tracking. Multi-touch doesn’t work unfortunately, unlike my Eee PC, but this isn’t that big of a deal. Also, the buttons are actually quiet! This has always been one of my favorite things about Toshiba laptops, the mouse pad buttons don’t emit a loud click.

So yeah, the system of course came with Windows on it (XP Home specifically), so the very first thing I needed to do when I got home was remove this and put Linux on it. Earlier this week I had installed release candidate for Ubuntu 9.10 onto my Alienware laptop from a USB drive. Now, the installer I originally loaded up had some issues with the GUI installer (probably because I followed instructions for a previous Ubuntu release), and so I was limited to the alternate installer instead. Not a problem, just a minor annoyance, so since I still had the drive set up for that I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, the installer decided that it couldn’t find the install ISO. Not wanting to recreate the USB installer again, I decided to stick with Slackware instead.

As usual I booted into the Slackware 13 installer using a USB stick, and then proceeded to install using an pre-mounted directory (through NFS this time) as the source. The install went great, but when I was most of the way through I realized that I had a bad symlink on my server and so I was actually installing Slackware 12.2. Oops. So, I fixed the symlink, rebooted the installer, and then redid everything. The install goes so quick anymore that it wasn’t really a problem.

During the final config I was of course given the chance to name my laptop. Keeping with my current scheme, female characters from anime or kaiju films, I decided to name it Kusanagi :^)

After rebooting, I did my usual setup:

• Installed the newer 2.6.30.5 kernel from /testing
• Installed a newer Intel driver (though I later compiled 2.9.0 from source anyways)
• Installed some packages from /extra that I like
• Installed various Slackbuilds packages that I had built over time and keep on my server
• Setup my user account
• Copied over data from my Rei (my other netbook)
• Set up Xfce just how I like it
• Set up my most often-used programs: Firefox, Pidgin, and the terminal

So how does everything work? So far, I can confirm that the web cam, SD card slot, VGA port, and both the wired and wireless connections work out-of-the-box with Slackware 13. Unfortunately the sound chip in it isn’t 100% supported by Alsa, and at first I had absolutely no sound. After I tinkered a bit (and installed a newer alsa-driver package from source), I at least got the headphone jack working. I can’t say if capture is working yet or not as I haven’t tried, but at least everything else (minus the speakers) is working perfectly.

As far as performance goes, it’s noticeably more responsive than my Eee PC. My guess is that it’s because it has a real hard drive in it rather than an earlier generation of SSD. I’m sure the faster FSB also helps, though ;^)

Now for some nice, large images. Click the links to open them.

• How the thing looks when it’s closed
• A comparison of the thickness to a Wiimote
• Left side
• Front
• Size comparison between my humongous old Alienware laptop, the new one, and my Eee PC. As you can see, it’s slightly wider than the Eee PC.
• Open laptop on its first boot.