Newegg now has a Ubuntu netbook for sale

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

I was looking around for a computer to recommend and noticed there as a linux entry under OS, turns out of was Ubuntu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231067
sadly it a low end system, but hey it is a start

[CharlesA]

Nice.

Not sure if it's bad or not, but my first thought was "Hey, that is about as powerful as my VPS" - I think I'll go hide now.

[montag dp]

Provided the hardware is well tested to work with Linux, products like this are good for Linux in the PC market. I think a lot of the negative perceptions of Linux come from lack of hardware support, which is understandable since most hardware manufacturers don't spend much effort developing drivers for Linux. Having options like this on the market, with Ubuntu already installed and known to work well, I think is good for that first impression for new users. That said, stuff can always break with updates even on a very stable system.

As a disclaimer, the above comments were made without any knowledge of whether this particular machine has been adequately tested with Ubuntu.

[ajgreeny]

Interesting to see that on the page they offer both MS Office, (well I suppose there is always wine), and McAfee Security suite as optional extras.

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, the bundling is pretty free-form and doesn't depend on the exact model. The 1015e is available in a Windows 8 version as well.

sadly it a low end system, but hey it is a start
Do you know when it was released? Ubuntu systems from Asus pop up now and then, along with some other Linux variants - the X201E (http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/X201E/#overview) is fairly recent and ran Ubuntu, and there were Ubuntu (or MeeGo) versions of many of their systems in the netbook range. I don't think they've ever completely stopped selling Ubuntu devices, and it looks like this one is mostly in the same vein of making them available in both Windows or Ubuntu versions.

Edit: Oh, I see - this one's the only Linux laptop available at NewEgg right now from the search (that is, in-stock). The X201E Ubuntu version (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230901) I mentioned was listed while it was in production.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

i don't know how long newegg has had it, but it does not show up on any pricy history sites i have found so it should be fairly recent
1st time i have seen a ubuntu computer at newegg

[KBD47]

If I had the money I'd buy one. I've run Ubuntu on a Acer netbook with less ram than that and it ran fine. If you have someone who doesn't want to fool with Win8 and doesn't need massive hardware, yeah, that would be good :-)

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

If I had the money I'd buy one. I've run Ubuntu on a Acer netbook with less ram than that and it ran fine. If you have someone who doesn't want to fool with Win8 and doesn't need massive hardware, yeah, that would be good :-)ram is fine, but a 1.1GHz Celeron cpu is not something i would recommend

[KBD47]

People are running Ubuntu fine on this with the same processor:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419670,00.asp?tab=Specs

I had it running on my C7 with 1.1 ghz celeron and 2 gig ram. Probably would run better with Xubu or Lubu desktop, but unless you need a speed demon laptop it should be fine. Certainly way fast than Windows :-)

[Linuxratty]

I've passed this info along.:)

[Warpnow]

ram is fine, but a 1.1GHz Celeron cpu is not something i would recommend

I believe this is the same 1.1ghz dual core celeron in the acer c7. While not a speed demon, its generally faster than its atom equivalents, and most of the other cpus being put into netbooks. I'm typing this on a C7 right now. I have ubuntu on it alongside the chrome os, and its definitely not a speed demon, but it works really well. No problem with video playback. Having multiple programs running simultaneously works as long as they're all fairly lightweight. It works surprisingly well all around.

It looks like this model is identical to the C7 but with a bigger battery. Probably be worth it...the c7 only gets about 3 hours, the bigger battery I imagine would net 5-7, plus no need to install ubuntu via the roundabout chrubuntu script.

[rouge haggis landing]

I bought this Asus 1015E to replace my Asus Eee PC 1000HA (a 2009-era netbook with a single core Atom processor). I've had it for a couple of days, so here's a rambling early review:

I'll start with the worst part about it. The wifi is a Broadcom 4313 chip, which has mediocre-at-best support in Linux. It works with the default installation (which is a mostly vanilla Ubuntu 12.04), but went completely off the rails when I tried to install Lubuntu 13.04. The default wl driver didn't work at all. Supposedly the native driver works well (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2140640&page=9&p=12736821#post12736821), but when I tried it I had weird issues with other devices being bumped off of the router. I could maybe get it working, but I didn't want to deal with it and so I'm using a USB wifi dongle that I had handy.

That's the worst part about the machine.

The best part is the little Ubuntu sticker on the palmrest next to the "Intel Inside" sticker. The next best is the size of the machine. It weighs ~2.7 pounds and is pretty thin for such a cheap device. The back is fatter above the battery, but it's not too bad at all. Maybe 1.5 inches at the back, about 1 at the front. A lot thinner and about half a pound lighter than the 1000HA, and you can really tell the difference. Somewhere in there is the line that divides a machine you can throw in a shoulder bag without thinking about, and a machine that weighs enough that you will notice it while you're walking around. The power cable is also tiny, just a wall wart without a power brick anywhere along it. Makes it easy to carry. The downside of the little cable is that it charges the machine very slowly. When I was using it and charging at the same time it was barely charging at all. The plug also tends to work free of the machine if I'm not careful.

The build quality is pretty good for a $250 plastic machine. The keyboard has a little flex to it, and the typing experience is slightly worse than on the 1000HA (which had excellent build quality for a netbook). But it's OK to type on, especially for a ten inch computer. Not completely mushy like the last generation of Acer netbooks, just not as nice as my old Asus. The rest of the machine feels reasonably solid for a cheap plastic machine.

The touchpad is wonky. The surface is too smooth, and I'm constantly hitting it as I type. It's too sensitive and no amount of futzing around has gotten it to stop being jumpy. It's usable, but subpar. The one on the 1000HA was a lot better.

The screen is reasonably bright, and it's a matte display (which, I think, is really important for a machine meant to be carried and used in all sorts of places). Viewing angles are OK. It's a 1366x768 screen. It's nice to have more real estate than on the old netbook resolution (1024x600). But on a 10 inch screen it means that things on the screen tend to be very, very small. When I played around with Kubuntu on the machine some of the arrows in the system preferences were so small that I couldn't really use them with the jumpy touchpad. Things are better in the default install (Unity is at its best on a small screen), but I wanted a more tradition desktop. Regardless, be prepared to do some tweaking to get things to a usable size, especially if your eyesight's not great.

The machine is fast enough. It handled switching back and forth between Firefox (with several tabs open) and Libre Office with no problems. It did OK with the Gimp, it streamed Youtube fullscreen without stuttering, it was fine with the relatively heavy KDE desktop with most of the effects on. I haven't done any benchmarking. I can't imagine it will do great work on demanding games, but the performance is a big step up from an Atom. I mean, it runs Battle for Wesnoth really well, and what more could anyone possibly want?

The hard drive seems to be a little slow, and I imagine an SSD would make a much bigger difference than a better processor. Unfortunately, the battery is the only easily replaceable part. I believe that the RAM is soldered to the motherboard, and my understanding is that you have to disassemble much of the chassis to get at the hard drive. Doable, but a pain.

The battery manager claims that I'll get ~5.5 hours of battery life. That seems about right, though I haven't tested and also haven't yet made any real efforts to extend the battery.

The sound is fine, not amazing. Pretty typical for this sort of machine. My little battery powered speaker is plenty loud when it's plugged into the headphone jack.

The fan is somewhat loud and is on more than I might like. The area around the vent on the left side of the machine gets pretty hot. The fan runs at a lower pitch, so it's not incredibly annoying. But you will hear it in a quiet room.

The machine is pretty basic looking, not especially sexy. The back is very shiny plastic and is, I think, specially designed to display fingerprints.

Like I said, the default setup was a pretty vanilla Precise install. When you boot for the first time it asks you some questions about account names and so on, then takes a few minutes to install the system. After that it's plain Jane Ubuntu. The drive came with a big locked NTFS partition and another backup partition, so a lot of the 320 GB wasn't available out of the box (I forget how much). I mirrored the drive and installed Lubuntu, as I said above. Other than the wireless, everything worked without any issues or any tweaking needed. That includes the function keys and the wired internet. (I haven't tried the HDMI out, the microphone, or the SD card reader.)

Overall I simultaneously like the machine and am a little disappointed with it. I love that it's a native Linux laptop that costs $250, is very small and light, has a matte screen, and is reasonably quick and well built. Now that I've gotten the machine set up to my tastes, I like the screen resolution. I wish that it had the excellent build quality of the 1000HA, but then it probably wouldn't be so light. I hate the wifi. The whole point of buying a machine with Linux installed on it is to avoid driver issues. I keep thinking about all of the lovely Intel chips that work perfectly under Linux. It's a real shame. I assume that it would have been OK had I stuck with the default install of Precise, but it would be much better for a machine like this to use a different wifi unit. Oh well. Still, I'm happy with it overall.

[KBD47]

Thanks for the review :-)
Sounds like it's best to stick with the 12.04 lts install.

[grier-devon]

Well I think it is cool Asus is giving this a try, I have seen this year a lot of companies trying new things this year with the failure of Windows 8 like more companies selling chromebooks, android convertibles and now more OEM's using Ubuntu for a desktop.

I think the only thing that bothers me is Canonical will have this Asus and any new Dell all over the Ubuntu website, we have low end, mid and premium notebooks with system76. Maybe Canonical should help the OEM who only supports there desktop and get that on Amazon.

[The-Server-4dmin]

I was looking around for a computer to recommend and noticed there as a linux entry under OS, turns out of was Ubuntu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231067
sadly it a low end system, but hey it is a start

Really cool to see. I have been loving seeing Linux becoming mainstream.

[MasterNetra]

lol Almost better then my laptop. Only thing my laptop has over is processor (Intel Core 2 Duo, both cpus at 2 GHZ). Though could upgrade meh ram from 1GB to 4. Dunno what the max is for hard drive (Have a Dell Latitude 530 I got from college 2009ish), but meh.


Really cool to see. I have been loving seeing Linux becoming mainstream.

lol not sure I would call it mainstream. More popular then it was x-amount of years ago, sure. But mainstream, nah.

[ifmw2]

I bought this Asus 1015E to replace my Asus Eee PC 1000HA (a 2009-era netbook with a single core Atom processor). I've had it for a couple of days, so here's a rambling early review:

I'll start with the worst part about it. The wifi is a Broadcom 4313 chip, which has mediocre-at-best support in Linux. It works with the default installation (which is a mostly vanilla Ubuntu 12.04), but went completely off the rails when I tried to install Lubuntu 13.04. The default wl driver didn't work at all. Supposedly the native driver works well (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2140640&page=9&p=12736821#post12736821), but when I tried it I had weird issues with other devices being bumped off of the router. I could maybe get it working, but I didn't want to deal with it and so I'm using a USB wifi dongle that I had handy.

That's the worst part about the machine.

The best part is the little Ubuntu sticker on the palmrest next to the "Intel Inside" sticker. The next best is the size of the machine. It weighs ~2.7 pounds and is pretty thin for such a cheap device. The back is fatter above the battery, but it's not too bad at all. Maybe 1.5 inches at the back, about 1 at the front. A lot thinner and about half a pound lighter than the 1000HA, and you can really tell the difference. Somewhere in there is the line that divides a machine you can throw in a shoulder bag without thinking about, and a machine that weighs enough that you will notice it while you're walking around. The power cable is also tiny, just a wall wart without a power brick anywhere along it. Makes it easy to carry. The downside of the little cable is that it charges the machine very slowly. When I was using it and charging at the same time it was barely charging at all. The plug also tends to work free of the machine if I'm not careful.

The build quality is pretty good for a $250 plastic machine. The keyboard has a little flex to it, and the typing experience is slightly worse than on the 1000HA (which had excellent build quality for a netbook). But it's OK to type on, especially for a ten inch computer. Not completely mushy like the last generation of Acer netbooks, just not as nice as my old Asus. The rest of the machine feels reasonably solid for a cheap plastic machine.

The touchpad is wonky. The surface is too smooth, and I'm constantly hitting it as I type. It's too sensitive and no amount of futzing around has gotten it to stop being jumpy. It's usable, but subpar. The one on the 1000HA was a lot better.

The screen is reasonably bright, and it's a matte display (which, I think, is really important for a machine meant to be carried and used in all sorts of places). Viewing angles are OK. It's a 1366x768 screen. It's nice to have more real estate than on the old netbook resolution (1024x600). But on a 10 inch screen it means that things on the screen tend to be very, very small. When I played around with Kubuntu on the machine some of the arrows in the system preferences were so small that I couldn't really use them with the jumpy touchpad. Things are better in the default install (Unity is at its best on a small screen), but I wanted a more tradition desktop. Regardless, be prepared to do some tweaking to get things to a usable size, especially if your eyesight's not great.

The machine is fast enough. It handled switching back and forth between Firefox (with several tabs open) and Libre Office with no problems. It did OK with the Gimp, it streamed Youtube fullscreen without stuttering, it was fine with the relatively heavy KDE desktop with most of the effects on. I haven't done any benchmarking. I can't imagine it will do great work on demanding games, but the performance is a big step up from an Atom. I mean, it runs Battle for Wesnoth really well, and what more could anyone possibly want?

The hard drive seems to be a little slow, and I imagine an SSD would make a much bigger difference than a better processor. Unfortunately, the battery is the only easily replaceable part. I believe that the RAM is soldered to the motherboard, and my understanding is that you have to disassemble much of the chassis to get at the hard drive. Doable, but a pain.

The battery manager claims that I'll get ~5.5 hours of battery life. That seems about right, though I haven't tested and also haven't yet made any real efforts to extend the battery.

The sound is fine, not amazing. Pretty typical for this sort of machine. My little battery powered speaker is plenty loud when it's plugged into the headphone jack.

The fan is somewhat loud and is on more than I might like. The area around the vent on the left side of the machine gets pretty hot. The fan runs at a lower pitch, so it's not incredibly annoying. But you will hear it in a quiet room.

The machine is pretty basic looking, not especially sexy. The back is very shiny plastic and is, I think, specially designed to display fingerprints.

Like I said, the default setup was a pretty vanilla Precise install. When you boot for the first time it asks you some questions about account names and so on, then takes a few minutes to install the system. After that it's plain Jane Ubuntu. The drive came with a big locked NTFS partition and another backup partition, so a lot of the 320 GB wasn't available out of the box (I forget how much). I mirrored the drive and installed Lubuntu, as I said above. Other than the wireless, everything worked without any issues or any tweaking needed. That includes the function keys and the wired internet. (I haven't tried the HDMI out, the microphone, or the SD card reader.)

Overall I simultaneously like the machine and am a little disappointed with it. I love that it's a native Linux laptop that costs $250, is very small and light, has a matte screen, and is reasonably quick and well built. Now that I've gotten the machine set up to my tastes, I like the screen resolution. I wish that it had the excellent build quality of the 1000HA, but then it probably wouldn't be so light. I hate the wifi. The whole point of buying a machine with Linux installed on it is to avoid driver issues. I keep thinking about all of the lovely Intel chips that work perfectly under Linux. It's a real shame. I assume that it would have been OK had I stuck with the default install of Precise, but it would be much better for a machine like this to use a different wifi unit. Oh well. Still, I'm happy with it overall.

Kudos for this excellent review, and so far it's the only one I've seen on the web! I had a previous netbook model that looked very similar to the 1015E and asides from never being able to get the full battery life from it, the trackpad jumping made it unusable. Every time I typed anything my palms would touch off the trackpad and make the cursor jump around the screen and set focus in another piece of text and my typing would continue from there. I hope that also doesn't continue with the 1015E.

If you ever come up with a solution that includes accidental touch rejection then it would be a pretty useful device to have!

[RichardET]

I was looking around for a computer to recommend and noticed there as a linux entry under OS, turns out of was Ubuntu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231067
sadly it a low end system, but hey it is a start

That's great! Thanks for the link!

[rouge haggis landing]

A quick addendum to my review:

I got the wireless working beautifully using the wl driver under Crunchbang Waldorf (which is based on Debian Wheezy and uses an older kernel). That's an option for someone with the machine. Crunchbang is a very fast and attractive, and works well with the machine.

I installed the preview version of Windows 8.1 on the machine. Everything more or less worked out of the box, and Asus' drivers for the Windows variant of the machine seemed to work well with this one. The touchpad became very jittery with the Asus drivers, and was very sluggish with the native Windows drivers. Overall, the experience was sluggish and a little annoying, but that was probably Windows' fault more than the machine's.

Under Crunchbang and Xubuntu Raring, in an air conditioned room under a moderate load Conky says that the CPU runs 60-65 degrees C. It's gotten up to 84 out of the air conditioning when the CPU and drive were churning, and even in air conditioning it idles around 50. So it runs hot, but not "I'm gonna die soon" hot.

I've decided that 6 hours is a fair guess as to its battery life, under both Crunchbang and Xubuntu 13.04. More if you're very conservative, less if you're watching video, etc. The thing is still absurdly light.

Supposedly, the 3.10 kernel has some changes that fix some of the wireless issues with this set of Broadcom drivers. So hopefully the next releases of the 'buntus will be a nice improvement. We'll see.

[wn1ytw]

I purchased an Asus 1015E with Ubuntu 12.04. On examining it I discovered strange partitioning and emailed the seller who pointed me to a couple things. I used Gparted to realign the 4th and 5th partitions and it sped up and made all of the drive usable. here is what the seller sent me:

http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance


That link will provide information on how to properly align partitions. Whether it is an SSD or Mechanical drive. There is nothing wrong with the drive, it is simply a partitioning error. A copy of the g-parted boot disc will help a lot with this. Which can be found at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

scott

[deadflowr]

I purchased an Asus 1015E with Ubuntu 12.04. On examining it I discovered strange partitioning and emailed the seller who pointed me to a couple things. I used Gparted to realign the 4th and 5th partitions and it sped up and made all of the drive usable. here is what the seller sent me:

http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance


That link will provide information on how to properly align partitions. Whether it is an SSD or Mechanical drive. There is nothing wrong with the drive, it is simply a partitioning error. A copy of the g-parted boot disc will help a lot with this. Which can be found at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

scott

Aside from part one and the lifehacker tips, if you have an Ubuntu livecd/dvd/usb you already have gparted on the disk.
It just doesn't get installed during installation.
Use the Try Ubuntu option to run a live session.
gparted is right there, easy to use.

[rouge haggis landing]

A further update to my review upthread -- the laptop's wifi issues are more or less resolved in Saucy. I think the brcmsmac wifi driver was fixed at kernel 3.10 or so, and it worked out of the box with the beta of Saucy running off a usb stick. I haven't installed it, but I assume that it would continue working after an install.

The brcmsmac driver has also worked well for me in Crunchbang (based on Debian Wheezy), which is what I've been using. In retrospect, Asus should have distributed a modified version of Wheezy with the machine rather than Ubuntu Precise. Oh well.

The last note is that you can disassemble the machine. It's case is almost the same as the Asus 1015P and 1015PEM, and there are instructions out there. It's not easy and a bit harrowing at times, and thoroughly voids the warranty. The wifi is replacable -- it's a half-height Mini-PCI Express card. The hard drive should be replaceable, but the screws on mine were so tight that I couldn't get it out of the bracket and was afraid of stripping them.

[donpoon]

I just purchased the 1015e with ubuntu 12.04. I installed ubuntu that come with the machine. I don't get any sound from the build in speaker. Don't get any sound from headphone through the headphone jack neither. There is no device list on the "Play Sound Through" list under the sound setting. Wonder if any of you experience this problem?