[sclug] cheap, cool running, linux-friendly netbook recommendation?

[Alex Butcher]

On Sun, 26 Aug 2012, John Stumbles wrote:

> I'm looking for a small laptop/netbook with good battery life, that runs cool 
> (my old HP G7010 used to double as a fan heater) and plays well with Linux. 
> Any heads-ups?

I've just bought a HP Mini 210-4120sa from Argos (I had some vouchers...):
<http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Search/searchTerms/HP+MINI+210.htm>.  It's
got a six cell, 5248 mAh battery that's supposed to be good for around 10
hours.  I haven't tested it, but I've only seen it using just over 7W when
running glxgears and both cores at full tilt.  It has the most recent N2800
Atom, which is supposed to support 4GB of RAM.  A couple of notes of
caution, though: firstly, the spacebar is a bit rubbish - single central
plunger, but it's so long that it tilts and fails to actuate it.  Secondly,
N2600 and N2800 Cedar Trail Atoms have Intel's GMA3600 and GMA3650 GPUs
respectively, which are actually PowerVR GPUs and support is correspondingly
fairly dismal.  Ubtuntu 12.04 LTS has a cedarview PPA, which supposedly
makes it relatively easy to set up with that distro.  Bring a Red Hat man,
I've ported it to Fuduntu and am working to try and get it into that distro. 
RH/Fedora/CentOS look like way too much work.

Alternatively, if you want a non-Cedar Trail Atom, I'm hearing good things
about the cheap-and-cheerful Asus X101H (note that the X101CH has a Cedar
Trail CPU and its memory soldered to the motherboard, so probably best to
avoid that one!)

HTH,
Alex