It brings a lark to your hand

I learned long ago not to fight snow and traffic in Seattle. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun, it’s just not worthwhile. That said, now I gotta. Here goes!

Updated 12/12/2009 for audio. Still running essentially stock lenny. After installing ALSA 1.0.21 by hand from source (lib, driver, and utils, in that order, not sure if it matters) and rebooting (too lazy to figure out which module was the ALSA one), the headphone bug is finally solved and the internal microphone works as expected. Thanks ALSA Project!

A post for the many folks around the world incessantly googling “nc10 debian” like I was/am. I’m not a guru and not a neophyte. Gurus will have more success with setting things up than I will.

Disclaimer: All of this advice is wrong. Following it will reduce your spiffy new NC10 to a hopeless mass of smoldering and rancid jello. Follow these steps only if you personally come to the conclusion that doing so is a good idea.

I just opened up my new Samsung NC10 a few hours ago, and it would seem that it’s pretty much everything I’d expected it to be. The keyboard is, indeed, a little small, but I can type at nearly full speed. I was able to interact easily with the netbook on the bus ride home, so it appears that my aspirations to make the time that I necessarily spend in service of work more effective may bear fruit. Riding in on the bus this morning, I did, indeed, get a small chunk of my thesis done. Many small chunks make a whole. Battery’s apparently on track to make it out to 5+ hours in linux with no power management, save a slightly dimmed screen, enabled. Build quality appears quite acceptable. I have minor misgivings about the nano-silver in the keyboard, but since there’s a pretty good bet that my “anti-bacterial” polypropylene shirts are also laden with the stuff, there’s probably no need for further concern.

Windows started up out of the box without a glitch. There’s a Samsung backup assistant thing that consumed some time, but it also allowed me to neatly repartition the hard disk into a small Windows partition and a large chunk of free space into which I later installed linux. The screensaver makes noise. I was able to Bluetooth associate the nc10 with my phone, but not yet vice versa, perhaps because I’m not at all familiar with the Windows interface to Bluetooth.

Debian installed nicely via a USB key, and I’ve spent the last couple hours bringing everything up to speed. I’m still struggling a little with getting wireless to work, but I’ll soon have that working nicely as well. After installing flash, youtube videos (Mindstorm Rubik’s Cube solvers! Holy crap!) had sound, so that works at at least zeroth order.

Useful things:

• xbacklight works to adjust screen brightness. Fluxbox keys makes keyboard control easy. Had trouble with adjusting to full brightness at times – switching the BIOS brightness control to user-based appears to have cured it.
• pm-suspend has apparently become standard for suspending/hibernating and seems to work as desired. Fluxbox keys and some sudo configuring yielded easy suspends from the keyboard
• Getting font sizes right required a quick fluxbox style edit and a .gtkrc-2.0 edit.
• External monitors/projectors can be enabled with xrandr –output VGA –auto (or –mode 1024×768, as desired). That effectively enables mirroring.

Wireless:

Installing Debian Lenny’s madwifi, blacklisting the non-ath5k drivers, and rebooting seems to have gotten the card working. It would appear that there may already be stable support for the ath5k drivers in 2.6.27, but I guess the word on the web is that Debian’s staying with 2.6.26 until Lenny goes stable. The Gnome NetworkManager has managed to make a solid connection with our wireless at work. Key bit there was knowing that the associated applet’s name is nm-applet .

Update: NetworkManager no longer works for me, reason unknown. Before it stopped working for me (powersaved broke it?), I was able to make WPA connections with aplomb. I can connect to an unsecured ap at present, possibly using configurations from wifi-radar.

Update again: I’m now getting consistent success making use of the madwifi drivers, killing NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher, and using wpa_gui and dhclient to obtain a connection and get a DNS address. WPA type 1 and unsecured connections have worked for me this way. Haven’t tried WEP yet, but I’m optimistic.

Useful to making wireless go:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NC10

http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/UserDocs/Distro/Debian/MadWifi

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202834

Outstanding issues (of all kinds, NC10 and linux alike):

• Wireless – it’s not foolproof for me yet, but it’s almost there.

Conclusions:

So far, the idea of a netbook appears to be a success. I’ll update this post if I make significant new discoveries.

Update: Made a trip with the netbook and it worked out very well. Able to work on planes and buses easily, work away from home with aplomb, and do so for impressively long periods of time. Also – hiked ~17-20km with the NC10 in a light pack. Compared to my usual load of mountaineering gear and skis, I hardly noticed its presence.