Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Ubuntu Mobile Edition

I got my hands on a brand new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 a few weeks ago & couldn't wait to test out the pre-loaded Ubuntu on it. What it came with surprised me somewhat & it certainly will surprise anyone expecting it to be the stock Ubuntu with some minor Dell tweaks.

The Ubuntu pre-loaded was very far from the standard Desktop edition. It is actually a heavily customized version of Ubuntu Mobile Edition (ume).

What does that mean exactly? It does not use standard Ubuntu packages, all the packages are compiled for the Low Power Intel Architecture (lpia). This also means that it does not utilize the standard Ubuntu repositories for packages. Dell provides a custom repository for updates & software. This means adding any 3rd party Ubuntu repositories is not possible. This is not a big issue as the Dell repository proved to be quite complete in providing all the packages I usually use.

The advantage you gain from using ume is the incredible speed. From power button press to a fully loaded desktop took just under 40 seconds. The desktop was also very responsive & application performance was great. The battery life is also quite good at about 3 hrs 20 mins. (in comparison, my EeePC 701 running Eeebuntu Netbook Edition took over 70 seconds to boot & only managed 2 hrs 40 mins despite having double the capacity)

Dell has designed a nice looking 'Easy Mode' style interface to run on their desktop. It's surprisingly customizable & looks awesome with it's flowing animated transitions. This is nice, but may annoy those who prefer a more traditional Ubuntu desktop. So they have thoughtfully provided an easy way to switch back to the standard desktop.

There are a few other notes that I'll simply list out:
- It uses a squashed root. Which reduced the footprint to just over 2GB.
- Compiz has been removed completely. It's not even possible to install it. (trust me, this is a good thing)
- Fluendo Codecs & Codeina provides for all your media playback needs. Java & Flash pre-installed.
- Incredibly good Bluetooth support. Even works perfectly with A2DP headsets.
- The 8GB SSD version I got certainly isn't enough for me. Invest in a 16GB Class 6 SDHC card.
- The SSD is pretty slow at 15Mbps write. Checkout RunCore's SSD for an upgrade.

Finally, what do I think about the Dell Inspiron Mini 9? Recommended. But I'd wait for the 32GB version. ;)

CPU Frequency Scaling on the EeePC

If like me, you are thinking about extending the EeePC's battery life by turning on CPU frequency scaling support, I can tell u now to forget about it. It doesn't work.

After turning it on & testing the temperature & battery life, I am very sure it does absolutely nothing for the EeePC. In fact, the only thing it did was make the system lag every time you click on something, this is because the CPU will scale to max for almost every single task. The system takes a second to scale, this is what causes the lag.

After reading in various forums & opinions on it, it's clear that frequency scaling does not improve the battery life or thermal performance of the EeePC 701 which uses an already sluggish Celeron M. In some tests, it even makes things hotter.

So, I've reverted to running the system at the standard 630Mhz with no scaling. I'm currently averaging about 170 minutes per charge with wireless on, which is not too shabby for an 8 month old battery.

eeebuntu Netbook Remix on the EeePC 701

A few days ago I decided to install eeebuntu permanently into the SSD of my EeePC, I've been running it live off a USB stick & increasingly found it far superior & far more flexible then the Xandros that came with the system. As u can see, I'm cautious about this step as I want to make sure that eeebuntu could effectively replace the Xandros. In this respect, I think the eeebuntu folks did a really great job.

As I increasingly discovered, Xandros did not afford me much flexibility & was in fact not performing well at all on my modest EeePC 701 4G. In operation, eeebuntu was much more responsive due to (I suspect) it's realtime kernel. The drawback though is obviously the boot speed, which I timed at about 1min 9seconds, this was far longer than the 34 seconds it took Xandros to boot. But compromises had to be made if you wanted a modern OS. eeebuntu is based on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1.

I'm going to try to detail my experience installing eeebuntu 1.0 NBR (Netbook Remix):
(Check out eeebuntu's Homepage)
- Installation went well without a hitch.
- Post Install, run the sndfix701.sh script in /eeesupport/scripts
- Sound should work fine now, but be careful when adjusting the volume with the Fn+hotkeys, for some reason it adjusts both Master & Front volumes. Adjusting it with the normal volume control works fine. For this I found that by setting the master channel to PCM (instead of Master) helped the volume control become smoother (still doesn't help the hotkeys issue though). In the volume options, I recommend to only enable these items: Headphone, PCM, Front, Microphone & Capture. Set Master & Front to the max & control all volume using only PCM.
- Due to a bug in the installer, the custom repositories used are not in the installed system. This is easy to remedy, simply boot the LiveUSB again, copy out the last 3 entries from /etc/apt/sources.list & put them into the installed system.
- The default ume-launcher has some issues of overlapping text on the 701. After updating to the new ume-launcher, the issue is resolved.
- SD cards will not mount because the system thinks they are optical drives. This is solved by commenting out the /dev/cdrom0 line in /etc/fstab
- I use zsnes to get my doses of old console games. zsnes will start with no sound at first, this is resolved by setting the sound sampling rate to 48000Hz & restarting zsnes with the parameters $ zsnes -ad sdl

Next time, I'll talk about optimizing the OS to boot faster, run faster & write less to the SSD.