So I was shopping today and this little computer here caught my attention and had me think about how useful it’d be. As far as usefulness is concerned, I didn’t really have the chance to “test” it yet, but it looks promising: the battery lasts very long and it is really light. Though it has just one CPU, playing videos up to 720p works just fine (after some work on the playback settings of smplayer).
After I bought it, the first thing I did was getting rid of this horribly slow Windoze 7 (starter edition). I figured it’d be a good opportunity to test Fedora 15, which ships with gnome3. I have to say: stay away! No doubt, gnome3 is a lot prettier than gnome2, but it’s a pain to work with it, as you have to navigate for a relatively long time for all programs that are not in your “favorite” list. It’s also a bit bugged (for instance, I couldn’t set up mobile broadband normally despite the device drivers being present and working because the “options” button simply didn’t do anything).
Fedora itself had a couple of crashes after just using it for about 30 minutes and doing nothing exceptional, both before and after I updated all packages, which is also not good.
So I decided to go for Fedora 14 and gnome2 again, which I am using to write this article right now, and it works perfectly fine! Wireless LAN worked out-of-the-box, mobile broadband just needed the usual configuration, the touch pad worked only after I installed the system (not on live cd), which is also perfectly fine with me. The only pain in the ass was getting a live cd working on an usb flash drive. The fedora liveusb creator created non-working images on the usb flash drive and I had to fiddle with it a bit to get it work, but after that, everything worked perfectly.
So my advice to anyone considering to get Fedora 15: stick with Fedora 14 for now. Gnome3 is a bit bugged and traded a lot of functionality for looks and Fedora 15 itself is a bit unstable at the moment.
The netbook itself is well designed. One of the few note-/netbooks I got the feeling that whoever designed it knew what he was doing. All the ports are located on the side of the netbook, a little towards the screen. This is one of the things that always bugged me on my 16” notebook: the sound ports are located on the front and the three usb ports are all located on the front right side, which will greatly annoy you whenever there is something connected to them.
loot, Random