Sat, 28 Feb 2009

NC10 samsung netbook

I started a little quest three months ago when I decided to purchase a netbook. I found those small devices extremely useful for me. Also, as a bonus, they are relatively cheap.

I started trying the acer one. It didn't quiet work for me. The performance was what I was looking for but it had a couple of big problems. First, the keyboard: extremely small and almost unusable if you are planning to do some serious typing. Also, the screen is too small, 8 inches is not enough for me.

My next attempt was the HP 1000. This one was the opposite of the acer: excellent keyboard but bad performance. With also another negative bonus: it run extremely hot. The Via C7 is just not what I need for my netbook.

Finally the Samsung NC10 came along. That was my winner. It basically has the best of the acer and the HP 1000. Very nice and usable keyboard, 10 inches screen and a Intel Atom cpu.

I planned to run an open source OS on it, most likely Linux so hardware compatibility was important for me. The NC10 hardware works out of the box with the latest versions of the Linux kernel and the latest Ubuntu/Fedora.

I performed an out of the box installation of fedora 10. Everything worked just fine: Video, suspend, hibernate, sound, wireless, etc... I used the netbook for around with more or less the default software that came with fedora. But gnome is too much for a netbook. Don't get me wrong, it works fine, but come on, we can do better than that. Then dwm came along. I don't recall how I found that amazing window manager but I am extremely happy I found it. It is exactly what I was looking for. First of all it allows me to control the computer mostly with the keyboard. On the other hand it is extremely fast and light. Actually I doubt it gets lighter than that.

Don't get scared by the minimalistic approach of dwm. If you try it, you will never go back to your old window manager. Check out the links I have in my delicious account (drio), under dwm. That's a pretty good start point. Don't forget of course the README.

Once you switch to dwm you lose all the convenient features you get for free in gnome: battery info, brightness control using fn keys, suspend/hibernate, wireless GUI wrapper, etc...

There are easy work arounds to that. Let's go one by one. For the battery info you can use the acpi command. Even better, use it to display info in your status bar. You'll find the details in the links I mentioned above.

For the brightness control use xbacklight. For example, to increase the brightness 10% do:

$ xbacklight -dec 10

For the suspend/hibernate, use the pm-utils. Gnome goes a step forward and hooks the power button to these tools. We could do the same but I am particularly fine just using the pm-utils from the console.

Finally the wireless. The device driver that interacts with the wireless card is the ath5k. There are other options out there but this one works just fine for me. Again, you can probably fire a GUI iwconfig wrapper but I prefer the console. And particularly, for home, I use this script:

#!/bin/bash 

sudo rmmod ath5k
sleep 0.5
sudo modprobe ath5k
sleep 0.5
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
sleep 0.5
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sleep 0.5
sudo iwconfig wlan0 ap XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
sleep 0.5
sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid "myessid"
sleep 0.5
sudo killall dhclient
sleep 1
sudo dhclient -v wlan0