The Netbook Thread

[Firefox]

So, there's a few ultra-cheap tablets starting to turn up, even under £100. Any thoughts anyone?

They all run Android or WinCE. In many respects, WinCE is closer to being tolerable than Android on tablets. And WinCE is utterly shite.

If you're still convinced to go with android, bear in mind that most of them are stuck with 1.5 or 1.6 , are horribly slow, don't have all the bits and pieces Android requires (accelerometer, compass, buttons, tend to be missing), the vast majority have fuck all battery autonomy, at under 300 quid you get a resistive touchscreen (no multi-touch for you), the hardware is under-utilised (video acceleration is generally missing, you won't be watching movies on them), and the source to the various hacked bits of Android are, more often than not, not being made available by the manufacturers.

As far as thoughts go, I think you'd be wasting your money if you were expecting it to be any sort of workable system, or do anything other than drive you to buy an iPad. I'm having fun with mine, but that's because I'm not using it as it's "supposed" to be used, rather as a cheapo ARM development platform.

I'd love one of those if it just had a very basic Linux install with working device drivers - especially the framebuffer and touchscreen driver.

When you say you use yours as a "cheapo ARM development platform", is that still within Android?

[tufty]

I'd love one of those if it just had a very basic Linux install with working device drivers - especially the framebuffer and touchscreen driver.

In *theory*, getting a basic linux system up and running is easy. The hardware is all supported, after all. Mine's an OMAP3530 (so there's your framebuffer) with an SPI touchscreen controller (TI TSC 2046I, basically an ADS 7846 clone).

In reality, there's a bunch of hacking required to get it up and running. The problem is Chinese manufacturers who couldn't give a flying fuck about the GPLed nature of the code they're using, from pre-booter through to kernel - you get jack shit in terms of source. That doesn't help you get a generic linux kernel up and running, although you *can* use the Android kernel (with certain caveats) and a generic Linux runtime.

When you say you use yours as a "cheapo ARM development platform", is that still within Android?

Not exactly, no. I started off hoping I could do what I wanted to do as an application within Android. I can't do that for reasons too complex to enumerate here*. So I wanted to take the next most logical step, which was to use the Linux kernel and hang my stuff off that. Can't do that because I can't get a generic kernel up and running with working video (/me curses Chinese manufacturers) and taking the Android kernel approach doesn't let me fix the show-stopping issues that kernel has, let alone plug in my own modules. The Linux approach was sub-optimal anyway, with the linux kernel taking an approach to resources which is basically orthogonal to what I want to do; the next logical step was to go to the metal.

Soooooo.

Pull out the trusty disassembler, start reversing the supplied version of U-Boot and looking at what happens, exactly, at initialisation. This gets me the low level initialisation stuff I need, and handily should give a hint to the linux guys on how to get it all working with a user-built stack

What I'm doing is an on-the-metal ARM Lisp-based OS supported by bits of U-Boot and ITBOK source. Still got no video, though.

* but which mainly take the form "Android is shit because...".

[Firefox]

Wow, that was a way cooler answer than I was expecting!

[PumaG]

Hi
late to the party.

A story about my Dell Mini 9 Hackingtosh, bought as a bargain on a wim ages ago, that ended up in temporary retirement (first due to a faulty battery and then again after the hours and pain trying to get OSX on there, and giving up with no hair left)
It was destined to become a NAS server with UNR, USB HDD and Samba.
But after the hair grew back, I was determined again, so I finally bought a new 16GB USB stick, 32GB SSD, new OSX disk and spent 2 nights tinkering.

Despite the powers that be trying to stop me (including rock bottom stupid mistakes, like scratching my last blank CD running up the stairs at 3am the previous night )
Second day, at 5am I had Snow Leopard 10.6.3 installed

I must have tried and failed at every procedure and application, for the much newbie desired 'windows only method' (inc Transmac crashing on Win7 64, having to go over to vista 32 laptop and switching between linux and windows for disk managent)
Its wasn't until, typically, I'd been down every avenue to get the right error messages to search on forums, that it got sussed out (I guess tiredness played its part)
The final procedure I used, a rehash of another rehash of the outdated Mcdrews, still lead me a stray slightly with wording due to being a newb, but got there in the end.

It wasn't an incompatible USB stick or a dodgy F5 key or the wrong BIOS version and/or settings neither was it a faulty external DVD
The problem ( right under my nose once the searches were done) was my new Amazon retail copy of 10.6.3 needing patching with the kernel from 10.6.2. Even though I'd made a lot of silly erros until this point, I had that good 'no more errors possibly left to make' feeeling at this stage.

So after defeating the powers that perhaps didn't want me breaking Apple's EULA. Spooky coincidence then, the Windows laptop I'd used for all the prep, blue screened after only 5 minutes of OSX goodness on the Mini (it needed complete re install on spare partition possibly due to automatic updates)

Result: Wow!

Firstly the Mini 9 runs Snow Leopard surprisingly well for only 1GB (upgrade on its way)
Secondly, OSX is a massive relief to use. I think the key is just how consistant it performs and behaves underneath, even on this little Atom based PC.
I was also surprised that it had found the kitchen computer naturally without me even being aware it was even still on the network, its been that long since a windows machine saw it.

The Mini 9 Mac is now the coffee table computer of choice for all to use.
As much as it hit me early on it would have been less painful to splodge on a real Mac, I actually feel even more likely to buy one now thanks to the hacking community

If anyone wants the now easy 'windows only' method I used for 10.6.3 just pm me.
You need a large (8-16GB) and a small (1GB) USB stick.
External CD/DVD drive
Blank CD
Retail Snow Leopard 10.6.3 from your favourite retailer (dont download image as you'll be down the wrong path and then some if it's corrupt and you get a nice Apple sticker to go on the lid, perhaps it was all a ploy by Apple after all )

[Gorecki]

*Bumpity Bump*

I've just bought myself a Samsung N145 along with a 2gb RAM upgrade (should all be turning up in a few days time). It comes with Windows 7 Starter Edition but I've heard rather bad things about it, in fact it's often referred to as Crippleware Edition.

Is it really that bad? I'm thinking about popping Linux onto it but which version would be best? Bearing in mind I'm a bit of a Linux newbie, I don't mind fiddling about a little bit but I really want something that's easy to set up and quite snappy to use.

[Surfr]

Another bump.

I'm toying with the idea of a small laptop to run Debian or other linux of my choosing. I'd like to get something well built with good battery life but I'm not fussed about overall grunt as I'll probably not even run X a lot of the time.

Saw the HP mini 110 in the Argos catalogue which looked OK.

[korruptor]

I converted my Air to Ubuntu. Works brilliantly. The first gen ones are rock bottom on eBay...

[Dio]

Probably because everyone's terrified of the battery or SSD being knackered, with it not being user-replaceable.

[matt303]

I dug out my old Acer Aspire and stuck Linux Mint on it, proper little usable machine. Was looking at the ThinkPad X131e as a little machine but I'm going to hold off and see what comes of these little atom based Win8 netbook/tablet convertibles.

[zip accident]

Is this one?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00D ... =computers

It's smallish, but not quite that small, its processor is 22nm process Celeron running at 1.6 GHz with a TPD of 17w, and it's cheapish, but not quite that cheap.

The keyboard flexes when I type on it, which is not usual for me. Notebook check review a version with a stronger processor, and they say the screen has a bluish cast, I can't argue that they're wrong, but I would say it's fairly slight, I have a nackered SVGA CRT, that has a yellow cast, and that's not slight at all, not that it used to be that way when new. However the viewing angles are lovely and wide, as the netbookcheck pictures reveal, I really like that aspect of their reviews. I've a full sized Acer laptop that has horrid angles, had them from when it was new, and that really put me off an little Acer on Amazon that was described has having bad viewing angles.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Len ... 934.0.html

[Firefox]

Dunno. Netbooks and laptops seem to have blurred together in recent years.

[Portland]

You can get some scary cheap Win 7 HDD netbooks these days - stockists clearing out. Some of the Asus One's in Tesco the other day made me want to buy one just in case our old one dies...

[random_dave]

My eeepc 901 keyboard decided to go a bit nuts lately, and with some of the button mechs knackered from spaniels climbing on it i picked up a replacement now that they are dead cheap

Unfortunately, although the phantom repeating key issues were fixed, some of the keys on the new one just didn't seem to work at all.

Fearing that the machine needed a complete replacement I started looking at my options for replacing it, which a lot of was looking into the latest chromebooks, and getting upset that there's no market anymore for a cute little 9inch machine with aftermarket batteries capable of 9-10 hours heavy load that i had become used to with the eeepc

At the weekend I had some free time, so i stripped it right down, hoovered it all, and put it back together, which fixed the keys!

Slightly upset that i now didn't have an excuse to buy some new hardware I thought i'd give chrome os a bash on the netbook anyway, and wow, it's pretty cool.

Using crouton, i now have a chroot setup that has the ubuntu environment in it, and by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+F1/F2 you can flick between ChromeOs and XFCE.
In ChromeOS it's great to install and configure apps like SSH and VNC, then simply get to work and my browser there already has all the new settings, and without any additional software like PuTTY or anything i can now use the same stuff to access my remote desktops. Obviously this applies to any instance of chrome that i can log into to, so it's really interesting to see what potential this kind of computing has, now that there is so much day to day that can be done in a browser
In the XFCE side i have my IDE and compiler toolchains so that i can do some programming, but also the linux steam client, so i can switch from ChromeOS into steam, awesome!

Now, obviously things like steam wouldn't work on an ARM chromebook, but seeing just a glimpse of how suitable ChromeOS can be for netbook like needs means that i am in no doubt that come time to actually buy a new machine that would probably be the route that I would take