Ubuntu 9.10 on Samsung N148 netbook

Lugging my Lenovo 15" screen 3 kg laptop to work and back was becoming too much of a pain for me. I usually work on spreadsheets and at work and maybe the occasional word processor. When there is time I read a couple of PDFs too. So basically its quite low intensive computing work. To get rid of the trouble and carry around less weight I thought of giving a netbook a try. Its something I've wanted to use for quite sometime now.

The requirements were fairly simple:

• It should be a 10" screen

• Should weigh about 1.5 kg

• Hard drive should not be less than 160 GB

• RAM should be about 2 GB

• Good battery life

• 802.11 n wireless card (not very essential)

• Should look simple

• Not too expensive just because it looks good.

A bit of looking around on the net showed me what was available in Kolkata. The Samsung N148 seemed to provide the best value-for-money option. What made it even more attractive was that it was preloaded with DOS and not Windows XP or Windows 7. Since I would install Ubuntu on the netbook, I didn't want to pay extra for the preloaded Windows OS which I wouldn't use a lot. I've had a bad experience with Windows XP on a low end (1.73 GHz Celeron CPU, 2 GB RAM) configuration laptop. I keep the OS updated regularly, defragment the hard disk every week, check for registry errors and other maintenance jobs. The firewall and antivirus software are also kept updated. In spite of all this, XP seems to take longer and longer to boot with every passing week. The firewall and antivirus consume about 25-30 % of CPU at any time and can shoot up to 100 % at times. I think the only reason I boot into XP is to download the updates for the OS and the security programs. I also have Ubuntu 9.10 installed on the same laptop and you cant help but love it. It looks awesome and works even better. Booting time is about 30 seconds and every program except Firefox shows superb start-up times. Photo editing using GIMP and minor video editing using OpenShot is fun to work with, watching movies with VLC and playing music with Rhythmbox or Amarok is nothing but pleasure. And I wasn't going to waste 7 GB of hard drive space just for a Windows 7 install.

The Ubuntu 9.10 installation on the laptop was already updated with the current linux kernel in the Ubuntu Karmic repositories and additionally I had some other PPAs installed. So what I needed was a backup of the system excluding the user files of course. The perfect tool to do that is Remastersys and I installed it from Synaptic Package Manager. Using Remastersys was a breeze and it is very well documented so that even a beginner should not have a problem following the instructions. Within a few minutes I had an ISO DVD image backup of my current system. The Samsung N148 being a netbook does not have an Optical Drive and I don't yet have an external one so the only way to install the OS would from a USB flash drive. Using Unetbootin, I created a live USB of the Ubuntu image backup and I suppose it was time for the installation.

The installation went smoothly since I wasn't going to dual boot this netbook. The whole hard drive space of 160 GB was allotted for the Ubuntu installation. The installation was of course very fast since it was running off a USB flash drive instead of a CD and it was over in about 10 minutes. On first booting the netbook I was pretty impressed that things had gone so smoothly. Then I had to sort out a few problems. The Fn key with the the other F keys weren't working. Fn + right and Fn + left worked out of the box to increase or decrease the volume. What didn't work and was quite important to me were the brightness controls. The Fn + up and down keys did not work and that was disappointing. So it was back to the internet to search for solutions and it didn't take time to find the solution. This incredibly useful site http://www.voria.org/forum/ had all the answers to my questions. Following instructions from the site, I installed a custom kernel from the PPA as mentioned on the site and all the Fn + F keys worked perfectly. Ubuntu 9.10 works almost perfectly on this netbook out of the box and it takes a few minor tweaks to get everything to work as intended. Even if the Fn + up and down did not work out of the box, most of everything else worked very well. The battery provides a backup for at least 5 hours even though I have configured the hard drive spin down time to about 5 minutes and the brightness to stay constant even when it is running on battery power.

I have to say that it really is a pleasure to use a netbook and using Ubuntu to run it makes it a better experience. When Lucid is released at the end of this month, I'll surely be trying that out to see how it works on this one.