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View Full Version : If you have a Ubuntu-preinstalled Dell Mini Inspiron 9, post your experience here



aysiu
October 13th, 2008, 10:15 PM
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dying to know what people's experiences are with the Ubuntu-preinstalled Dell Mini.

If you have one (and not a Windows-preinstalled one you install Ubuntu on yourself), can you post your experiences here? Either an actual post here or a link to a more detailed blog entry on the subject.

Here are some things I'd love to hear talked about: What makes typing easy or difficult? How long is the boot time in seconds? What repositories are enabled by default? Does resume from suspend-to-RAM work reliably? What applications are installed by default? What's the battery life like in hours? What do you like best about it? What didn't quite meet your expectations?

frankleeee
October 13th, 2008, 11:19 PM
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dying to know what people's experiences are with the Ubuntu-preinstalled Dell Mini.

If you have one (and not a Windows-preinstalled one you install Ubuntu on yourself), can you post your experiences here? Either an actual post here or a link to a more detailed blog entry on the subject.

Here are some things I'd love to hear talked about: What makes typing easy or difficult? How long is the boot time in seconds? What repositories are enabled by default? Does resume from suspend-to-RAM work reliably? What applications are installed by default? What's the battery life like in hours? What do you like best about it? What didn't quite meet your expectations?

The Dell mini is what is on the way to LaRoza right now I believe. Are you curious of this due to your ownership of the Asus eee pc

aysiu
October 13th, 2008, 11:26 PM
The Dell mini is what is on the way to LaRoza right now I believe. Are you curious of this due to your ownership of the Asus eee pc
Yeah, I like the Eee, but Ubuntu gets an extremely slow boot time on it, and I can't stand the Asus implementation of Xandros. The Mini is very tempting, but I'd love to hear more detailed reviews of it.

smartboyathome
October 13th, 2008, 11:32 PM
Yeah, I like the Eee, but Ubuntu gets an extremely slow boot time on it, and I can't stand the Asus implementation of Xandros. The Mini is very tempting, but I'd love to hear more detailed reviews of it.

Aysiu, ZaReason does preinstall Ubuntu on the Eee PC, but I'm a fan of the Eee because of its far superior battery times (none of the others really come close) and the support of larger SSDs.

aysiu
October 13th, 2008, 11:41 PM
Aysiu, ZaReason does preinstall Ubuntu on the Eee PC, but I'm a fan of the Eee because of its far superior battery times (none of the others really come close) and the support of larger SSDs.
Does ZaReason have a 20 second boot time on their preinstalled Eee? I have installed and configured Ubuntu on the Eee and done all the fixes so that wireless and sound work, but I cannot get the boot time down lower than a minute, no matter what I try. I also have only the 4 GB 701 Eee, so the future larger SSDs don't really help me much.

Murrquan
October 13th, 2008, 11:44 PM
And can anyone look on the bottom of one of those machines and find out what country the Inspiron Mini is manufactured in? I know they make some of their XPSes in Malaysia, but I heard that the Minis were made in China.

theacoustician
October 15th, 2008, 06:09 PM
I'm posting from one now!

Dell has managed to load a lot of nonsense and crap ware on this thing. They also made Yahoo the default search and installed Yahoo toolbar (yuck).


Other than that, its a pretty snappy little machine. The keyboard takes some getting used to. I think I might get rid of the launcher ribbon though.

LaRoza
October 15th, 2008, 06:23 PM
Here are some things I'd love to hear talked about:
What makes typing easy or difficult?
How long is the boot time in seconds?
What repositories are enabled by default?
Does resume from suspend-to-RAM work reliably?
What applications are installed by default?
What's the battery life like in hours?
What do you like best about it?
What didn't quite meet your expectations?

Typing is pretty easy, but there are a few things one has to pay attention to (relocation of "'" and """ (you try to quote quotes)). It isn't hard to type on.

Boot time isn't extremely long, but it isn't extremely fast. Enough for me to boot it up for someone at RadioShack on the counter without getting bored. I never timed it.

The Ubuntu repositories I think. I didn't check.

I hear it does.

4 hours.

It works and didn't mess up Ubuntu (although the Dell bar is out of place visually, but it is easy to switch back to the default Ubuntu look.)

See my blog.



Dell has managed to load a lot of nonsense and crap ware on this thing. They also made Yahoo the default search and installed Yahoo toolbar (yuck).


I think you exaggerate ;) It has the yahoo toolbar for Firefox and the Dell bar. Neither are mandatory, and Dell included a lot of stuff that is useful (cheese, codecs, etc)

theacoustician
October 15th, 2008, 07:27 PM
I think you exaggerate ;) It has the yahoo toolbar for Firefox and the Dell bar. Neither are mandatory, and Dell included a lot of stuff that is useful (cheese, codecs, etc)
The Dell garbage, the Yahoo garbage, and all the useless games and education apps. Granted some of the games are in the default Ubuntu install, but why on Earth are all these stupid educational programs on here?

Now, its not nearly as full of garbage as say a new Windows box from Dell (or worse Sony), but its more than I was expecting.

chris4585
October 15th, 2008, 07:49 PM
@LaRoza can you delete the categories in the dell launch bar as well as add new categories?

LaRoza
October 15th, 2008, 07:54 PM
The Dell garbage, the Yahoo garbage, and all the useless games and education apps. Granted some of the games are in the default Ubuntu install, but why on Earth are all these stupid educational programs on here?

Because this machine will be used by people who are young a lot most likely. Don't demand you have customized setups ready to go. It is Ubuntu made for people who just by it and go. It has no trialware or anything. It has software that would be interesting. If you don't like that, remove it.



Now, its not nearly as full of garbage as say a new Windows box from Dell (or worse Sony), but its more than I was expecting.
So you find useful software (that is actually advertised. It was no secret those educational programs were on it) that is free to be garbage? You can remove it. You can reinstall Ubuntu. You can do anything you want.


@LaRoza can you delete the categories in the dell launch bar as well as add new categories?

Yes. There are little plus signs for that.

earthpigg
October 15th, 2008, 09:03 PM
how are the speakers? could the kids in the back seat, for example, watch a movie without needing headphones?

LaRoza
October 15th, 2008, 09:07 PM
how are the speakers? could the kids in the back seat, for example, watch a movie without needing headphones?

The speakers are good, however, it is hard to judge. I would recommend getting a pair of headphones.

If it weren't exceptionally loud, I imagine one could use it for that, but it doesn't have an optical drive (media on SSD or flash drive obviously would be an advantage).

init1
October 15th, 2008, 09:21 PM
Yeah I'm considering getting one. It would be nice to have a large hard drive, but 4GB's enough for most things.

PartisanEntity
October 15th, 2008, 10:28 PM
I would be interested to know about battery life experiences

chris4585
October 15th, 2008, 10:34 PM
Yes. There are little plus signs for that.

thanks, I saw the plus signs before, but wasn't sure about deleting a category

LaRoza
October 15th, 2008, 11:06 PM
I would be interested to know about battery life experiences

Around 4 hours.

PartisanEntity
October 16th, 2008, 03:20 PM
Around 4 hours.

hmm that is not bad at all

christetro
October 16th, 2008, 07:32 PM
First time poster and new to Ubuntu. I am a Help Desk manager and fairly savy. The learning curve has not been bad at all on Ubuntu.

I get about 3.5 hours of battery life.

I dont feel its full of crapware at all. Maybe I am conditioned from years of Windows machines to expect more.

The keyboard took me about a day to get used to.

In the beginning I had some full partition errors when launching office apps. Has not happened since.
I can connect to my corp network and RDP into a windows machine.

Configuring the proxy server has been a bit sticky but i chalk that up to our ISA server.

Next up is setting up our vpn.

Oh and .. in the airport.. CHICKS dig it! ;)

LaRoza
October 16th, 2008, 07:48 PM
Oh and .. in the airport.. CHICKS dig it! ;)

I get wows from mine, by anyone.

It is a good way to get people interesting in Ubuntu (and netbooks)

feranick
October 16th, 2008, 10:13 PM
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dying to know what people's experiences are with the Ubuntu-preinstalled Dell Mini.

If you have one (and not a Windows-preinstalled one you install Ubuntu on yourself), can you post your experiences here? Either an actual post here or a link to a more detailed blog entry on the subject.

Here are some things I'd love to hear talked about: What makes typing easy or difficult? How long is the boot time in seconds? What repositories are enabled by default? Does resume from suspend-to-RAM work reliably? What applications are installed by default? What's the battery life like in hours? What do you like best about it? What didn't quite meet your expectations?

1. weird combination of keys: awkward position of ' and ", very small tab. No right CTRL. No F11 option at all. key size is fine, it doesn't take too much time to learn it.

2. None of the official Ubuntu repos. Instead, specific ones are available in the third party tab. See here for more. (http://www.ubuntumini.com/2008/10/check-out-dells-mini-9-repositories.html)

3. Suspend works perfectly and it's pretty fast too (3 secs).

4. 3.5 hours

5a. The SSD is partitioned to 4GB, regardless of the total available (16GB in my case). You had to resize it or make another to take advantage of the full SSD.

5b. NO F11!!!

5c. Some aspects of the GUI are still not yet optimized for the small screen (it goes overboard a bit).

brook adams
October 23rd, 2008, 07:23 AM
I got my mini 9 last week. It works great and the kids love it. very handy and the netbook remix has only crashed once. I'd call it a winner

wbarido
October 25th, 2008, 02:47 AM
I received my Mini yesterday. It ran well, but did not recognize the full size of my ssd.
Today, I installed the Dell update using update manager. This painlessly corrected the problem of my ssd being mis-formatted to only 8 gigs.
Now I have access to the full 16 gig drive.
The Mini is everything that I hoped it would be - 8.9 inches of pure Ubuntu goodness.
Thanks Canonical, and thank you, Dell.

LaRoza
October 25th, 2008, 02:51 AM
I received my Mini yesterday. It ran well, but did not recognize the full size of my ssd.
Today, I installed the Dell update using update manager. This painlessly corrected the problem of my ssd being mis-formatted to only 8 gigs.
Now I have access to the full 16 gig drive.
The Mini is everything that I hoped it would be - 8.9 inches of pure Ubuntu goodness.
Thanks Canonical, and thank you, Dell.

That partition sizing was fixed for the newest Dell 910's. It was due to them using the same image for all the drives.

Glad to hear the updates fixed it.

j.carpenter
November 3rd, 2008, 01:22 AM
The Update Manager does not show any of the packages to be updated like it did with Hardy 8.04. I cannot find out how to tell what packages will be updated on the Update Manager.

And for those looking for F11 especially to maximize a Firefox browser, I am able to use the "windows" key. Seems like it has been remapped to F11.

Lovin' my Mini!