My brother Paul bought a netbook on Sunday - a Samsung NF210. Now I’ve heard and read a lot of flak over netbooks over the past few months, but I still thought it was a good idea. Now that he’s a charter pilot, and hopping all over the world at a moment’s notice, it just makes sense to have an ultra-portable machine that he can still do some actual work with. After playing with this thing for the past couple of days, I have to say that it certainly is more than I expected.

Executive Summary

I’m going to try to give the non-geeky summary up front, so only those who really want to read my technical ramblings have to do so.  :)

How good a netbook is depends largely on what you want it for. If you want to edit photos, compile programs, work with video files, or anything else that requires a lot of power - then yes, you should avoid netbooks. But for normal every day work - surfing the web, writing stories, editing documents, reading ebooks, and such? A netbook is a fine choice. Sure, the processor is slower than in other machines. This Atom CPU feels about as powerful as a Celeron. But it’s more than enough power to connect to the net, check your email, and then some. The keyboard of this particular model is especially nice - all the keys are separated, so it’s easy to use and I don’t hit three keys at a time (like with some of the other netbooks I played with).

So if you’re thinking of getting a netbook, go for it. You can have my geek cred as a reference. It’s not a bad decision, especially considering the prices these things sell for.

Now it’s time for me to get my geek on

I think a lot of the flak netbooks get is because of Windows 7. I’m sure everyone realizes by now that I am not a fan of Windows. But in all seriousness, I poked around the interface for about ten minutes before I had enough. Between the slow rendering, the popups telling me my computer would explode if I didn’t buy Norton’s security suite, and the 1+ minute boot and shutdown times… ugh…

A big part of the problem is that netbooks ship with “Windows 7 Starter Edition”, which is a very watered down version to say the least. Even the so-called “Home” edition gives you more power than this. I’ve heard rumors of it being limited to running three applications at a time (or two?) but I honestly didn’t use it long enough to find out. It certainly wasn’t limited to the number of popups it could show me. Stupid Norton.

Ten minutes. That’s how long I used Windows 7. Then I wiped the hard drive and loaded Linux.

Installing Fedora 14

The installation was a little rough, mostly because netbooks don’t have CD / DVD drives. I downloaded the Fedora 14 network install CD (about 280 megs) and manually wrote it to a USB stick using the dd command. I changed the netbook’s boot order to include USB drives and booted into the installer. That’s where the grief began. The network install CD is built (supposedly) to allow someone to install the operating system over the Internet. But it doesn’t work. The installer wasted hours trying to loop through all 55 mirrors, unable to connect, incapable of authenticating the xml files it was downloading. It looks to me like they changed something in their repositories and never updated the network install CD. So I went with plan B - I downloaded the entire Fedora 14 DVD, mounted it, and shared it over NFS. Installation went somewhat smoothly after that. I chose to encrypt the entire file system. Might be a little slower in access and booting times, but if someone steals the thing it will be a brick.

Once installed, the system didn’t quite work. I chose to install LXDE, a lightweight desktop that is much more responsive than the default Gnome desktop. But one thing about Fedora that had been true since about Fedora 4 is that if you don’t do the default install, you don’t get a usable system. Their “spins” versions helped a lot in that regard, but in my case I installed from a DVD and did not install Gnome, so all I got was a text prompt. After a few hours of installing all the programs they didn’t bother to include (including Xorg.. I mean, how can you say “LXDE is installed!” if you don’t include Xorg??), I finally managed to boot into a GUI.

Responsiveness

This is where dealing with a netbook really got interesting. I wanted to know, from a usability standpoint, just how annoying this machine was going to be. The answer: not much. Sure, it’s got a 1.6 Ghz Atom processor, which is basically a low-power Celeron (512 kb cache, weeee). But with one gig of ram, it’s not too shabby. I can run programs in a reasonable amount of time and having 10 programs open at a time and task-swapping doesn’t skip a beat. Overall, it’s a decent machine. Not anywhere close to my main machine (quad core with 8 gb ram) or even my laptop (dual core with 2 gb ram), but I can do work on this thing without getting annoyed.

But first things first… boot times. Under Windows 7, it took the machine a little over one minute to boot to the desktop. Shutting down took about the same amount of time. With Fedora 14, I hit the power button and after about 5 seconds of POSTing (which was the same under W7), I get to the wonderful little “enter your password” prompt. After doing so, I’m at the login screen in about 20 seconds. Shutting down turns off the machine in about 5 seconds. And this is without recompiling the kernel. I’m hoping to get the boot time under 10 seconds once I’ve done that.

As for the hard drive, I’m pretty sure it’s a 5400 rpm drive, maybe slower. Hard to tell for sure, but it’s certainly not very speedy. If you go the linux route, make sure to add the “noatime” parameter to your fstab file for all the hard drives you’re mounting. Makes a big difference on this machine. (by default, the OS updates the “last accessed” time on each file it touches, which creates more disk writing work. “noatime” stops that)

Graphics Performance

This is not the type of machine to play the latest and greatest games on. I wasn’t even expecting this thing to handle a movie. At all. Not even with a crappy Silverlight / Flash player. But Intel’s GMA 3150 is no slouch. It actually has better OpenGL performance than the ATI HD3300 card in my main machine. I ran glxgears and was getting a solid, consistent 60 fps in full screen mode.

So, on a whim, I installed XBMC on our new netbook. I pointed it to my MySQL database where all the metadata files for my collection are stored. I ran the program and was shocked at how responsive it was. I watched a short movie, streaming it over my wireless G network, and without the netbook plugged into an outlet. The whole movie played without even dropping a frame. The 1024x600 resolution screen is more than enough for DVDs and the image was crystal clear. And this was a file I encoded from my collection - in h.264, with the audio uncompressed. Even my Mac Mini has problems streaming these files over a wireless connection. Have I mentioned being impressed with this netbook?

Battery Life

Here’s another important consideration for any portable device. My laptop has crappy battery life. I know it’s probably the dual core CPU and the 512 mb video card that are draining it, but it’s still a major annoyance. I barely get an hour and a half out of the thing.

This Samsung netbook has a battery that is, physically speaking, about a third of the size of my laptop’s battery. Maybe a tad smaller. My first impression was “oh no”.

According to the sales guy, this netbook advertises “up to 14 hours of battery life”, which we all know is a lie (or at best, a half-truth if you mimic their exact testing environment). Under Windows 7, he assured me I could expect at least 4 to 6 hours of battery life. Most of the people I know who have netbooks get similar performance.

With a fresh install of Fedora 14, and under what I consider to be normal use conditions (several windows open, browsing the web, installing software, Open Office Writer, etc), my initial tests put this baby at about 8 to 10 hours of battery life. And, again, that’s without recompiling the kernel. I just know I can squeeze more battery life out of this thing. There’s all sorts of debug statements and useless drivers built into the stock kernels — drivers for stuff like MCA and EISA cards which have been obsolete for decades, bah. And don’t even get me started on the amateur radio support.

The End

I have a few more programs I want to install and configure on this before I consider myself done installing stuff. And now that I have succeeded in getting XBMC to work, Paul should in theory be able to connect over a VPN tunnel to our network from anywhere in the world to stream movies from our collection. I like doing cool things like that. I think my next venture with this is to install something like Calibre and see how it functions as an ebook reader.