Just rescued a colleague's Samsung N150 netbook

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

This machine came with Windows 7 home edition, plus anti-virus etc (time limited), and basically she didn't use it because it was unbearably slow. Playing with it a little in Win7, you couldn't close it unless you agreed to terminate background programs. The icon to log-out/close down was well hidden! I made a remix on a memory stick at the weekend, using LXDE and adding British English, Libre Office, Skype, Pidgin, Chromium-browser and a few others, along with acme, gnome-power-manager, gcalctool, to make it all more netbook friendly. I made desktop files for acme and gnome-power-manager and added them to the autorun file in /etc/skel and also for the guest user. The remaster was a little over 1Gb.

Anyway the thing ran from the memory stick, and impressed immediately - being from the stick it took a while to load, but was quick enough once running. Did the installation, the only problem was "suspend" didn't work properly, gave a black screen on restart, but hibernate worked fine, and as she said when I explained the difference, if the battery's about to run out, it's best not to have it depending on any power at all.

Everything else appears to be working fine, and it's flying. I'd also added VLC, so in Chromium and VLC she has two familiar programs to get her started. I showed her how to add users and added a "guest" user. I have to say that the keys aren't as good as an NC10, and it would be nice if a future kernel update fixed the suspend problem.

I showed her some basic maintenance, updating, emptying the wastebin (slightly odd with PCFman), how to "eject" a memory stick, and I think she was impressed with the simplicity of it. Computers really throw her generally and I think that in the effort to do everything for you, I think Windows has actually become unbelievably complicated.

Hopefully when she got home she got the internet connecton sorted out, and a neglected machine is being put to good use.

[T6]

yes, those atoms with 1 gb and windows 7 are slow to use, you need to wipe win7 form the original install and install a clean version without all the crap and then add inf files, video driver, wireless, video card dirvers and camera drivers to make it usable, very usable i must say

still, windows 7 needs 2 gbs of ram so the first thing you need to do with it is remove the 1 gb moduel and put 2 gbs of ram in it to make it viable

btw, this one can run kde4 perfectly, just as my toshiba netbook

[melodie]

Hi,

My son has a netbook Samsung N210, which also came with Windows 7. Obviously not possible to use it either. It even had sort of a strange "linux" : HyperSpace Phoenix technology". :>
Any Linux distribution (installed several, including KDE) works better... than the original OS.

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

Yes - I know that KDE works as I had it on my NC10 - but I've found that a well-setup LXDE is perfect for the job - my favourite thing is to put a self-hiding panel at the top of the screen with all my most-used programs, which makes everything easy to get at. On the netbook remix I did I set up a good starter-panel with all the sort of stuff you'd use in this type of machine, and copied it to /etc/skel for new users. For me that's straightforward in LXDE, more so than KDE.

[melodie]

Hi Davecs,

I have installed Openbox, and Education which is built on Openbox Bonsai, and tried lately the KDE4 64bits testing : I was impressed to see that it was working normally without any lag. The 64bits instructions seem to do good to it. With Openbox, as we have setup a rc.local configuration file to use the zram kernel module, it does good too as the machine has 1 Gb memory only. I can use LibreOffice in it if needed, without feeling any slowdown. For the panels, I know hiding them is handy, however I prefer lowering their size. (Be it tint2 or lxpanel).

[Nippur]

Well I got my new netbook and it is sooooo bad under W7 that you can barely use it.I was very dissapointed 

Even with android it is not so good.

But with Pclos it is great.Nearly as my big laptop.I'm very happy 

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

What I love about Linux with netbooks is the way you can have panels with icons which pop out from all 4 edges of your screen, you can put stuff on them like shortcuts to programs and they are always available, never hidden under another window. Multiple desktops are also a great boon. And they tend to use lower-power processors and have a little less RAM (Maybe 1Gb instead of 2) this does not seem to hurt PCLinuxOS, even the heaviest version (with KDE), but Windows 7 has no chance on it.

I like LXDE because it is very fast, and can be made to look like the old KDE3, (oxygen theme, clearlooks window decorations) no frills, no 3D effects and very functional.

[OMSkates]

Hi,

My son has a netbook Samsung N210, which also came with Windows 7. Obviously not possible to use it either. It even had sort of a strange "linux" : HyperSpace Phoenix technology". :>
Any Linux distribution (installed several, including KDE) works better... than the original OS.

My sister has the exact same netbook which had win7 and Hyperspace.  It is now running Phinx with Gnome-Power-Manager and Cairo-dock, she likes it   However I still can't get tapping to work on touchpad and I need to get volume keys to work.

[OMSkates]

"Just rescued a colleague's Samsung N150 netbook"

That's real groovy davecs, I think she'll love it!

[Neal ManBear]

Congratulations, Dave.      

[jaydot]

clever stuff, well done, davecs.

[OMSkates]

Davecs.

Does your touchpad work properly being able to tap etc on the Samsung NC10? If so can your share your configuration file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

I just put KDE MiniMe with openbox on it so using that login (openbox-kde) instead of using Kwin which makes it almost as fast as LXDE.

Still in the process of setting everything up but it runs great!

[Ɗα√ϵς§]

Well - I plug in a mouse, I just can't get on with touchpads, but you'd need to add gsynaptics to get the tapping working.

[OMSkates]

Well - I plug in a mouse, I just can't get on with touchpads, but you'd need to add gsynaptics to get the tapping working.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,94073.msg828717.html#msg828717
Thanks davecs!

[melodie]

Hi,

I installed gsynaptic on my laptop T60 yesterday, and I tried to figure out what you all call "tapping" : I succeeded in making the touchpad acting weird before resetting it as it was. What do you call "tapping" ? (the touchpad on T60 naturally works very well !)