Update: Linux Mint 10 on the netbook

Hi there.

Here we are one week later, and I'm still using Mint 10 on my Ideapad s10. How's it gone so far? Quite nicely actually! I initially found the wi-fi to be a little flaky for reasons I never really got to the bottom of, but it is fine now. I know it wasn't poor reception because I was using the netbook under Windows in the same locations without issues, and if I rebooted under Mint after the wi-fi dropped out, it would reconnect again with full signal strength.

It hasn't come back again as a problem after the first few days, so I haven't looked into it further.

The only other area of frustration I can report was screen resolution. The desktop looked great "out of the box" on the netbook's own 1024x600 screen, but when I tried plugging it into a monitor, I was limited to 800x600, or 640x480. Yuck!

I spent considerable time digging through the menus and included config applications, and then tried looking through additional packages I could install to fix this, but nothing jumped out at me. Finally, I reverted to my old friend, Google. My first searches for "changing screen resolution in Mint 10" weren't that successful, so I then made it more direct with "changing screen resolution in Linux". That was much better, and I quickly became aware of, and used the xrandr command in a terminal window to see what resolutions were supported, and picked the one that best suited my monitor. This reminded me of the fact that with Linux, you can often do things much more quickly and simply by going to the command line, rather than looking for a distribution's specific configuration tool, as long as you know the correct command to use...

All in all it is working very well now, and going through this process has made me realise how useful this little netbook actually is. I am now trialling making it my main "desktop" machine for email, social networking, downloading, blogging, surfing etc, but also enjoy being able to simply unplug it from the monitor and keyboard/mouse in my study and take it with me when I go anywhere.

It is now the central storage and access for my main email accounts and personal documents, all within Linux (Mint 10) and it is very portable to boot. (...and yes, I am keeping it backed up in case I drop/lose it somewhere.)

Have I walked away from Windows entirely? No, of course not. I still have my media encoding box here running a patched up copy of Vista."MediaPC" still contains my bluray burner and has AnyDvd installed so I can easily burn home audio and video projects, or rip and encode any video or audio for storage in my central media NAS that serves up movie and music goodness throughout my home network. (I really must blog about that sometime...) What has changed though is that the Vista box is now headless (no monitor or keyboard) and I simply access it and assign it new tasks etc through a remote desktop on the netbook. That way, I don't even have to be in front of it and see what it is up to when I need to check encoding progress or do some housekeeping on it such as moving encoded projects over to the NAS.

So far, so good. I'll let you know how it goes again in a few weeks, or report any significant problems in the meantime, but I'm not expecting anything significant now after this first week.

Later.