My ancient Thinkpad died a few days ago. A moment's silence, if you please.
...
Thank you.Being largely skint, I grabbed myself the cheapest netbook going. A Dell Mini 10v. It's awesome. The screen's razor sharp, the keyboard's satisfyingly clacky, and it's really well put together.
Being of the RedHat persuasion, the installed Ubuntu OS survived exactly one boot before being replaced by the mighty Fedora.
- Get the binary WiFi drivers:
$ su -
# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
# yum -y update
# yum -y install kmod-wl broadcom-wl - Tweak PulseAudio so it doesn't use so much CPU:
$ su -
# sed -i 's/; resample-method = speex-float-3/resample-method = speex-float-0/' /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
That's about it, really. Install Flash at your leisure and enjoy full-screen YouTube, iPlayer et al.
There's only one thing wrong with this netbook, and that's the touchpad. The buttons are under the pad, but the areas over the buttons are touch-sensitive, so you can't drag and drop without the pointer flying off in all directions. This isn't a problem that's particular to Linux - Windows 7 users (XP as well, I'd imagine) are reporting the same problem. If you run Linux, though, you get to talk to the developers and raise bug reports. So that's what I did. We'll see how it pans out.
