Samsung NC10 & Linux
- January 8th, 2009
- Posted in Coding . Life
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I’ve had the NC10 netbook now for about a month now. I’ll some up what I’ve done so far since my last post.
- Installed Ubuntu using Wubi.
I messed around a little with Ubuntu and Netbook Remix. I was only a little impressed with UNR. For whatever reason whenever I opened up a new application from the dashboard it would open, then be obscured by the dashboard. I haven’t found a solution to this and it’s damn more annoying that the calibration issues with the trackpad. I also started having issues with the Ubuntu wireless driver. It worked for a while, then it just quit on me. - Unistalled Wubi, Used Unetbootin to install OpenSuse.
At this point I thought to try out something new. I’ve never use OpenSuse before. I downloaded Unetbootin HERE and selected the 11.1 installation. Everything install smoothly and I thought the OS was pretty usable. My only gripe is the boot time and how it handled (or lack there of) hibernating. I just could not get the thing to hibernate when I closed the lid and when I initiated it manually it took forever to do so. On the upside I really do like the new KDE 4.1 series. So much that I’ll upgrade my Mandriva desktop to it this weekend. - Over-wrote OpenSuse with Ubuntu.
So I tired easily of OpenSuse and decided to go back to Ubuntu. The boot and shutdown times were faster and there wasn’t as much bloat. This sort of thing really does become important for a mobile, battery powered device. I’m not going to use UNR though. I’ll just stick with the standard desktop interface and customize it a little more.
I really do like the NC10 and Christine really gets a kick out of how responsive and handy it has become. It takes up very little space and tucks away neatly out of site in our living room.
My goal now, as I mentioned above, is to customize the interface a little more. I’ll setup the email client and browser. I’ll configure a media player to connect to my content server and make sure I can play music and movies.
At some point I think I’ll write an application that will let me selectively sync my NC10 with the media server and it will allow me to have only the media I want on the NC10. So if I want to watch Iron Man and Charlie Wilson’s War on my next trip, but I don’t want to watch Super Troopers again, it will remove the old movie and sync up with the newer ones.
I think I’ll also want to add a photomanager… maybe Picasa or something similar. And my Sansa utilities… yeah, that all sounds about right.
UPDATE:
I discovered that having desktop effects enabled in Ubuntu was causing the focus issues in Netbook Remix. After disabling this everything works great!
Hello Chris,
Thanks for this post. I just took delivery of a Samsung NC10, so far I’m really impressed.
Like you I wanted to run Linux on the NC10 but didn’t want to wipe the drive so the Wubi installer looks to be a good option.
Ideally I’d prefer to run Linux from an external drive and found this article which explains how to move a Wubi installation to a USB drive:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/move-wubi-ubuntu-install-to-an-external-usb-drive/#more-507
Not sure how well this will work or if it is the best way to do this but it will be interesting to find out!
Nick Elliott
I think Wubi is great for trying out Linux and getting a feel for how it all works. I do not think it is the best choice for a permanent install. One of the down sides is that it stores all your data in a file rather than a partition. This becomes dicey if you lose power in the middle of write. The result could be unrecoverable file corruption.
For a USB drive install try checking out Unetbootin @ http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
Thanks for the tip, I used UNetBootin to install Kubuntu from a USB pen-drive onto a USB HD. Worked great, just need to fix the screen resolution and wireless and I’ll be happy.
good blog. my nc10 is a german spec operating system and i`m looking to convert to linux. just making sure that its gonna work. thanks