[Sussex] Need a new machine and Unity

[Will Earnshaw]

Hiya list!

First of, sorry for missing the last moot. I hope you all had a good 
time. I'm yet to see a massive appeal to the whole tablet computing 
scene so it was a shame to miss the talks. The thing that bothers me the 
most about tablets though is the lack of tactile feedback on your 
fingers while trying to touch type. Although I'm sure like anything you 
can get used to it!

As those of you who went to the surrey nokia meeting know, I am really 
in need of a new machine, but I don't want to be spending a fortune on 
one. I was thinking about getting one of those notebook, netbook, triple 
e, whatever they are calling them, the little ones. They seem rather 
cheap and after seeing how well Ubuntu 10.04 can run on a 600mhz 
processor I'm more than confident that they will have enough omph behind 
them in order to run probably any distro.
Have any of you had much experience with these notebook computers? They 
do seem very nice and hopefully a little bit cheaper.
Basically, I'm looking for a bit of a temporary...6 months or so 
solution, so if I can pay roughly £200-£250 that would be perfect. I 
certainly don't want to be spending hundreds on a bleeding edge system. 
I might even consider buying a second hand system from ebay, again, if 
any of you have any stories about that I'd love to hear them!

When I get my new system, I'm going to maybe try out a diffrent 
distrobution. I do unity for the most part, and its almost very very 
nice, only its that global menu that only sometimes appears on the bar 
and other times appears on the window, its just too inconsistent for me. 
Maybe it can be turned off and just be above the window like gnome and 
KDE but I'm yet to find out how. I might have a look at Mint....or just 
stick with Ubuntu 10.04 I just don't know if having an older version is 
a good idea in the long run.

Many thanks

Will