OS experimentation on the mini 10

Since Dell is sending me a new mini 10 sometime next week, I decided to get a bit adventurous with this one. I'm currently reinstalling the OS, using the newest Ubuntu install of its UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) distro variation. I can't quite figure out every way in which this differs from the regular desktop version of Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope" [props to the little monkeys in the Ubuntu naming dept.]); it is supposed to be optimized for netbooks, including a "smart phone style" desktop manager, but apart of the USB stick based install it seems to be a standard x386 based distro.

The installation image is a little less than 1GB in size, and it can be placed in a thumb drive and made bootable. It allows you to first try out the new install, without actually making any changes to the installed OS, which I did. The results were net positive but with a few issues, wich I put down to the fact that I was running from a generic trial mode:

• All hardware seemed to work fine (bluetooth, wifi, webcam, sound), except
• voice capture (the mic) didn't work (trial mode or settings?);
• the resolution was incorrect (another artifact of the trial mode?);
• screen drawing and refresh was very sluggish, with screen buffers doubling on each other (again, hopefully an artifact of the trail mode);

Without much to lose, I decided to go ahead and fully replace the Dell installed 8.04 with the new 9.04 UNR version of Ubuntu. That was accomplished by finding the Install icon on the "favorites" main screen of the desktop interface. After a few minutes reformatting the HD and copying things, the system rebooted ("press any key to reboot"), and came back up.

The installed UNR 9.04
A few problems off the starting line:

• Wrong resolution (turns out my hypothesis regarding trial mode artifacts was incorrect);
• the screen draw/refresh is very sluggish (idem);
• the mic doesn't work (idem).

So it seems that the dry-run mode on the UNR install image is very accurate of what your experience will be after the full install. I'll keep that in mind when my final system arrives. Of the problems mentioned above, I was not concerned about the resolution or the mic, since I suspected a bit of fiddling with settings will yield good results (read further for my conclusions). The screen sluggishness is a different story. That would render the system uncomfortable to use, and if it cannot be resolved I'll have to find a different OS to install on this mini.

Troubleshooting
Soon after rebooting into the newly installed system, I received an update warning indicating there were software updates to download. I decided to this first, in the off-chance that the update would correct some of the issues. This step took about 10-15 minutes, and required a reboot. And it didn't resolve anything (I didn't really expect it to).

Time to start searching. It seems that Ubuntu has issues with the chipset used by the mini 10 (Intel Poulsbo [clearly Intel must have outsourced their product naming duties to Canonical]). Without the correct drivers for this chipset, the system uses the generic VESA drivers, which use the 800x576 resolution, which is basically the 4:3 aspect ratio version of the display's native widescreen of 1024x576. So the trick is to add the new drivers to the system by adding the Ubuntu Mobile Team's development repository (here) to the software sources list of the apt-get system, as such:

# first add the new source keys, so apt can verify repos authenticity:
% sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C6598A30
# then create a new sources list file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d with the contents:
% cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-mobile.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
# finally, update the system and install the new drivers:
% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ps

The steps above came mostly from here.

At this point I should probably state that I got tired of the little screen (made even worse because of the incorrect resolution) and decided to go back to my desktop, and ssh into the mini. As a side-note, Ubuntu is the first distro I've every put my hands on that didn't think of installing the ssh daemon in by default! I actually had to run 'apt-get install openssh-server' to get it; I cannot even begin to imagine the thought process by which someone (presumably the same group of individuals that comes up with the Ubuntu release names) decides sshd is not that important, and let's leave it out of the default install. WTF?

Anyway, reboot and, voila, the mini 10 in all its native resolution glory! The default UNR desktop interface is still sluggish as ever, a well known defect it seems, so I switched back to the classic Gnome desktop. That, fortunately, works fine.

The mic still isn't working. More searching reveals that this might be a regression on the ALSA drivers since Ubuntu 8.04. I guess it's a matter of waiting until that gets solved on the Ubuntu repositories, as my attempts at resolving the issue via settings all failed.

Conclusions
At first glance Ubuntu UNR 9.04 seems to work fine, but it might not offer any advantages for the usage I have in mind. The mic issue should not interfere with line-in recording, which is all I need for my ham digital mode transmission project. But this kind of minor defect (together with the fact that the default UNR 9.04 packages may not have been compiled specifically to take advantage of the Atom's architecture, according to this post on the Ubuntu forums) suggests that this version of UNR may not be mature enough. I'll choose to wait and see if further developments make it more mini 10 friendly in the future, and will stick to the Dell installed 8.04 LTS instead. For the record, this install exercise, together with the troubleshooting, took roughly 3 to 3.5 hours.

Dell Mini 10 Review

I have recently acquired a Dell Inspiron Mini 10, a small, stripped-down laptop (a.k.a. netbook, sub-notebook) with limited performance -- at least when compared to modern full-sized laptops or desktops -- but excellent mobility characteristics. What follows is a review.

Firstly, some details on what I actually got:

• Inspiron 1010, Intel Atom Processor Z530, 1.6GHz, 533MHzFSB, 512K L2 Cache, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 500, 1GB RAM.
• 10.1 Inch High Definition Widescreen Display (1366x768)*
  
• Connectivity: ethernet, 802.11 g/n, Bluetooth.
• 160GB, 2.5inch, 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive.
• 56WHr Lithium-Ion Battery (6-cell).
• OS: Linux Ubuntu 8.04
• Price tag (including shipping and after a 10% discount coupon): $420.26

* Dell actually shipped the wrong display model on my mini 10, and I'm writing this review on a 1024x576 widescreen display. Their customer support tells me they'll be shipping a new mini with the correct specs within 5 business days.

The processor
I stopped following processor technology roughly around 2002, a little after I left academia for a software development job. I still find the technology interesting, and am amused by how processor clock speeds have basically stagnated since then, and SMP became the rule, kinda (under the guise of multicore chips). I can't help but think this a cheat to keep up with Moore's law: each single processor or core hasn't really doubled in speed in the last every few 18-month cycles, but we throw more of them in a die so the number of cycles available should make up for it, right? I don't know. It used to be friggin' hard to get any piece of multi-threaded code doing anything remotely useful to scale linearly back in 2001, and I suspect it can't have gotten that much easier today. A quick search on Atom reveals that this is a 64bit x86 with power efficiency front and center. So my 1.6 GHz x86 64bit portable should be roughly equivalent in performance to whatever I was running sometime in 2001-2, except I'll be using less than 200 A of current and won't need a giant fan blasting noisily on top of an equally large heat sink, and the rig shouldn't heat up a small room.

[Edit: Actually, the Atom Z530 (Silverthorne) in this mini is a 32bit architecture. Atom's next iteration (Diamondville) will reportedly be a 64bit instruction set.]

The OS
The mini 10 can be acquired with a Dell-installed Linux, which saves you $50 on the MS Windows XP version. Given the likely usage pattern on a device such as this (internet browsing, email reading, maybe some multimedia handling), going the Linux route is a no-brainer, and it's what I chose.

As its Linux distribution, Dell opted to use Canonical's Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" (following that company's tradition of having their releases christened by bubbly "artistic-creative" wii-playing twentysomethings that probably think they're hard-core hackers because they can run apt-get on the command line and can use vi without crying too much (but they call it vim)). Published in April 2008 it isn't the latest Ubuntu, but it is their current LTS (Long Term Support) release, and it's guaranteed to be maintained and updated through 2011. Their release-naming department not-withstanding, this seems to be a rock-solid OS platform (Ubuntu is a Debian Linux derivative, so this isn't a surprise), and Dell did a very good job adapting Ubuntu to its product: Everything works as it would on Win XP, including the keyboard special keys, the screen-embedded webcam, proprietary sound/video codecs, etc.

On the usability front, Dell chose to ship a custom desktop interface that's actually not bad, and hides the Gnome desktop that long-time Linux users will be familiar with and is standard with Ubuntu. If you don't like the "smart phone style" interface, you can easily revert back to the standard Gnome desktop from one of the main menus.

Battery life, ergonomics
I ordered the largest battery offered by Dell for this model, and which is claimed to last for as long as 8 hours. I've had it on and off throughout the day today, disconnected from its power supply, and my battery indicator still seems to think I have about 30 minutes of power left. This kind of performance is entirely satisfactory to me, so I'll leave it at that.

Ergonomics on the mini 10 sucks, no other way to put it. The finger pad is at the very edge of the keyboard area, so my hand hangs at a higher angle than is really comfortable. The battery shape, jutting out on the bottom, turns it into a rear stand (as part of the design), giving the keyboard a forward slant that I personally dislike (I'd prefer a flat-laying keyboard). The keyboard feel, on the other hand, is great, and it makes it quite pleasurable to type on. For a machine this size, the keys are actually quite large, and no smaller than on my other two keyboards within line-of-sight as I type this.

So, does it cut it?
In short, yes, it does. It plays streaming media (although online videos skip frames like crazy). It can run firefox with a dozen tabs open (which is more than you'll probably run on a screen this size). Google Earth 5 ran competently (it was choppy when the maps move, but otherwise very usable). I don't expect it will play any half-modern games (I didn't even try), but other than that, everything else just runs. OpenOffice starts up reasonably fast (I don't perceive it to be any slower than on my desktop). All of the system utilities (kismet, wireshark, gpg, the Ubuntu package manager software) I experimented with are handled as well as they would anywhere else.

The use I have in mind for this system is as part of a mobile amateur radio digital transmission platform, and I doubt any of the software I'll use would pose a computational challenge to any processors released after 1998 -- though I have yet to try running the software modem layer I'll need, and am not quite sure as to what to expect there; given that software modem drivers have been around for more than a decade, I have reason to believe the mini 10 will handle them fine. So the final verdict is that, yes, it should cut it for what I intend to use it, and I'm very happy with what I've seen of the mini 10 so far.