Ubuntu in net books

[louisgonick]

Greetings,

After having my old laptop for four years, it's battery stopped functioning properly and the charge lasts for a few minutes now. I looked up a few replacement batteries online and found them to be pretty expensive. As I visited the store today, some tiny net books caught my eye. I found out that the battery of a net book lasts for up to 10 hours, which is pretty amazing.

I mainly use my computer for school, and such battery life seems to be just perfect for me.

I was wondering if someone else runs Ubuntu in a netbook, and if the performance is acceptable for basic things such as taking notes with a note taking app and browsing the Internet.

I would be either erasing windows or dual booting.

I'd like to hear from a Linux netbook owner before I purchase one.

[carl4926]

I use a fairly basic eeepc

Machine: System: ASUSTeK (portable) product: 1015PEM version: x.x
Mobo: ASUSTeK model: 1015PE version: x.xx Bios: American Megatrends version: 0904 date: 11/16/2010
CPU: Dual core Intel Atom CPU N550 (-HT-MCP-) cache: 512 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 ssse3)
Clock Speeds: 1: 1000.00 MHz 2: 1000.00 MHz 3: 1500.00 MHz 4: 1000.00 MHz
Graphics: Card: Intel N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller
X.Org: 1.11.3 drivers: intel (unloaded: vesa,fbdev) Resolution: 1024x600@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel IGD GLX Version: 1.4 Mesa 8.0.4

12.04 works well
12.10 not so good
Mint 13 Mate: Very well

Yes, battery life is good. Newer ones are better than mine @ 5hrs

[PhilGil]

I was wondering if someone else runs Ubuntu in a netbook, and if the performance is acceptable for basic things such as taking notes with a note taking app and browsing the Internet.

I would be either erasing windows or dual booting.

I'd like to hear from a Linux netbook owner before I purchase one.

You don't state what country you live in, but if you're from the US you can usually get cheap replacement laptop batteries from ebay.

I have an older netbook with a single core Atom processor and 1GB of RAM. It runs Debian/XFCE OK, but it's not a speed demon even with a light window manager. While newer netbooks have more powerful processors and many come with 2GB of RAM, I'd still stick to XFCE (Xubuntu) or LXDE (Lubuntu) rather than run a graphics heavy environment like Unity or Gnome 3.

Another option for note-taking and web surfing, particularly if you're already using Google apps, would be a Chromebook.

[rushikesh988]

Greetings,

After having my old laptop for four years, it's battery stopped functioning properly and the charge lasts for a few minutes now. I looked up a few replacement batteries online and found them to be pretty expensive. As I visited the store today, some tiny net books caught my eye. I found out that the battery of a net book lasts for up to 10 hours, which is pretty amazing.

I mainly use my computer for school, and such battery life seems to be just perfect for me.

I was wondering if someone else runs Ubuntu in a netbook, and if the performance is acceptable for basic things such as taking notes with a note taking app and browsing the Internet.

I would be either erasing windows or dual booting.

I'd like to hear from a Linux netbook owner before I purchase one.

I am running ubuntu on my netbook which acer One AOD257
Its battery lasts for 6 hours (Its been 1 and half year). And I think ubuntu for netbooks has a great performance as per the battery is concerned.

[PaulW2U]

I was wondering if someone else runs Ubuntu in a netbook, and if the performance is acceptable for basic things such as taking notes with a note taking app and browsing the Internet.

I would be either erasing windows or dual booting.

I'd like to hear from a Linux netbook owner before I purchase one.

I have a Samsung N130 which when purchased had Windows XP installed. It was never fast even after upgrading the memory to 2GB.

My first attempts at installing both Ubuntu and other distributions were considered failures as I could not get the wi-fi to work. Once Ubuntu's kernel was updated to include the support that I needed I found that my netbook worked far better than it did when running XP. However, I soon found out that Unity wasn't as suitable for netbooks as I was led to believe. Gnome Shell was utterly useless on it.

So I switched to Lubuntu. At first I installed 12.04 and then upgraded to 12.10 which I'm very pleased with. As for the speed. it's very fast, certainly faster then when I first took it out of its box about three years ago and activated XP.

By dimming the screen, the battery life is usually shown as being around 6 hours maximum which is about the same as XP reported.

[matt_symes]

Greetings,

After having my old laptop for four years, it's battery stopped functioning properly and the charge lasts for a few minutes now. I looked up a few replacement batteries online and found them to be pretty expensive. As I visited the store today, some tiny net books caught my eye. I found out that the battery of a net book lasts for up to 10 hours, which is pretty amazing.

I mainly use my computer for school, and such battery life seems to be just perfect for me.

I was wondering if someone else runs Ubuntu in a netbook, and if the performance is acceptable for basic things such as taking notes with a note taking app and browsing the Internet.

I would be either erasing windows or dual booting.

I'd like to hear from a Linux netbook owner before I purchase one.

I'm glad you posted this thread as i am also thinking of getting a netbook at the end of the month.

Any, and all, suggestions in this thread will benifit at least two Ubuntu users

[Peter Maunder]

I run an American ACER Aspire One 160GB hard drive, USB connected DVD drive for occasional use. Dual boot XP, originally 10.04 currently Linux Mint 13 / Mate, wireless mouse.
Works fine with Classic (no effects) or Mate.

I find that battery life is effected when Wi-Fi is enabled.
When not on the road I use little Acer as a test system with wireless keyboards English, French and Swiss, Ubuntu switches between them with no problems.

[louisgonick]

Thanks.

I'll try to get a dual core atom processor, as from what I've read here, is the best.

I'll give it a try with 12.04, if those net books can run Win7, I guess that Ubuntu must run pretty decently there. Maybe not unity 3D, but unity 2D will do.

I also plan to upgrade its ram and use an SDD to improve performance.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will be posting updates once I get my little netbook sometime this week.

[LiamOS]

I used 12.04 on my netbook for most of the summer, but the performance was woeful. xubuntu and lubuntu were improvements, but I still found the performance to be way sub-par.

Currently I run Gentoo on my netbook with the most insanely optimised setup I could come up with(btrfs with lzo, no gtk/qt at all, xmonad, lots of tmpfs), and it runs very nicely. That said, I really need performance from my netbook, as I do a lot of processing with it while I'm at university. I also love my ~10 second boot from a rotating hard disk.


If you really require a GUI, I'd say xubuntu would be your best choice for a netbook as far as ubuntu-based distros go.

[localhost8080]

ive tried various flavours of ubuntu / suse / mint / backtrack on my netbook

it can be a bit hit and miss as to what works and what doesnt.

probably the best thing to do is to get the netbook and setup a partition and try a few distros till you get a good one