FORGERY LEAGUE

Sunday 1 November 2009

Ubuntu on the HP Mini 110

I’ve been contemplating getting a netbook for a while - a small, cheap, rugged machine I can sling in a backpack and use for writing. This week I got an HP Mini 110 as a surprise gift. It’s certainly nice and compact, and has a lot going for it. And thanks to the wonder of Dropbox I can keep my writing files synced between my various machines with practically no fuss.

A few first impressions:

Decent sized keyboard, but weird key placement: there are in fact two backslash/pipe keys, both placed for maximum annoyance where my fingers expect the Enter and left Shift keys to be; more on this below. Included battery is a bit clunky but packs several hours’ worth of power. The camera (see right) is possibly worse than my cheapass phone, but I’m not too bothered about that.

The model I have came with Windows XP, which I have no use for on a daily basis - Windows and I simply do not get along. However, it may be of some use for, say, previewing websites, and in any case this machine has more than enough drive space to keep it around. So I’ve loaded on the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (version 9.10, codenamed “Karmic Koala”). The installer conveniently partitioned the drive and set up dual booting. It’s snappy, no-frills and wakes from suspend mode in an instant, and features a simple launcher app that provides access to your programs. However, there are numerous quirks and pitfalls, even with this most user-friendly of Linuxes. I’m no Unix expert, so it was a good day or so of Googling and gritting of teeth to get everything in order.

In particular, it took ages to get wireless networking going. The basic procedure turned out to be something like: download the drivers for the Broadcomm wireless adapter and extract to a handy directory; install ndiswrapper and ndisgtk using the Synaptic Package Manager; launch ndisgtk and tell it where the driver .inf file is, and things should work—however, your proverbial mileage may vary; I found the solution through much trial and error and online forum-digging.

Likewise a hack to make those ridiculous backslash keys behave like Shift and Enter. One solution turns out to be simply: create a file called .xmodmap in your home directory and put the following in it:

keycode 51 = Return NoSymbol Return NoSymbol Return
keycode 94 = Shift_L NoSymbol Shift_L NoSymbol Shift_L
add Shift = Shift_L

There are some hiccups with Javascript under Firefox, notably Gmail’s labeling system (rather than opening a dropdown, it just sent everything to my Drafts folder).

The standard codecs for audio and video don’t seem to work. There may be fixes down the road for this, but again, I’m not too concerned; I have an MP3 player for that.

UNR has a background app that makes sure programs launch in full-screen mode, which is great most of the time—there’s no room for multiple windows on something this size. However, it has odd effects on some programs intended for a windowed environment, and it helps to know that Alt-F10 switches the current program in and out of full-screen.

And speaking of that little screen: surfing, reading or doing pretty much anything else that requires staring at it for too long is a recipe for a stiff neck and a headache. (For similar reasons, I’ve decided my hand-me-down iPhone is a lousy game machine.) But that’s not such a handicap—all I wanted, after all, was a fancy word processor. So if you ever see me touch-typing and staring off into the distance, you’ll know why.