Samsung N210
The laptop I have been using as my main machine for a few years now has been struggling – it is four and a half years old – and I decided that it would be best to replace it before it failed. I have been looking at options for a while and I decided that I would go with one of the new Intel Atom N450 series laptops.
I settled on the Samsung N210, with a memory upgrade to 2GB. I have set it up to dual boot Windows 7 and Kubuntu. I’ve not really used Windows yet and intend to change to the specific netbook version of Kubuntu when the new version comes out.
My initial impressions are good. The battery lifetime is impressive and the machine is near silent. The smaller screen takes some getting used to, but with some suitable change of settings there is still plenty of screen space.
I’ve had an N210 for roughly 3 weeks now, and have wiped the HDD clean and installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (closely followed by the Ubuntu Netbook Edition files). The only problem I have encountered is the screen brightness buttons don’t work, so therefore the battery doesn’t quite last as long as it did through Win 7. However, by comparison, I like Ubuntu an awful lot more, and believe that it’s only going to get better. Hmmm, maybe I’ll try openSUSE or Mandriva soon…..
The wireless is now working – I am unsure why it was not working under Kubuntu before.
I generally get six hours life out of the battery and this is a great improvement over my old laptop, which lasted less than an hour.
I’ll be installing KNR 10.04 RC to the N210 during the next few days. I anticipate maybe some wifi drivers needed. I can report here later
I have been using KNR 10.04 for the last couple of weeks. The wireless is not working at the moment, but I have not made much of an effort to find a solution to this problem yet.
hello, so it’s been nearly a month since you posted this above. how’s the netbook?
i’m seriously thinking of getting myself the N210, wipe the Starter edition off and install a vers of Linux… so i guess it’ll be good to hear how it’s been for you. have come across a couple of posts online where users say upon installing linux, some of the functions of the netbook don’t work.. did you encounter that? :S
I am liking the netbook.
I decided on dual booting – Kubuntu Netbook 10.04 with the existing Windows 7 Starter. There are a couple of issues with functions in linux – the screen brightness buttons do not work (and possibly some of the others) and I have had some problems with the wireless.