[Wolves] HP Mininote 2133 for £200

[Adam Sweet]

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Jim Prince wrote:
> 
> 2009/3/7 Adam Sweet <drinky76 at yahoo.com <mailto:drinky76 at yahoo.com>>
> 
> 
>     People who are interested in netbooks, like myself, will be aware
>     that the HP Mininote 2133 was probably the most highly specced, had
>     maybe the nicest keyboard and definitely the best screen but cost £360.
> 
>     I dropped into PC World today as I was passing and they are selling
>     the HP Mininote 2133 for £200 and it seems a few other places are
>     too as HP are dropping the 2133 in favour of an Atom based Mininote
>     1000s. It's a Via C7-M processor at 1.2GHz (marginally less speedy
>     than 1.6GHz Atom, remember clock speed isn't everything), 1200x768
>     resolution which is more than any other netbook, 1GB RAM, 120GB hard
>     disk, wireless B/G, bluetooth 2.0 and webcam running the slightly
>     dated SUSE 10.1.
> 
> I was looking at this machine myself. Can it really do 1200x768? The one
> I looked at in PC World was set to 800x600 but I guess it could have
> been badly configured.

Yes it can. The one I saw in PC World was configured badly too and it
crashed when I tried to change the res. Not a promising start but I
bought one anyway and this one is running at the advertised resolution.

Initial thoughts on it are that the screen, keyboard and build quality
are excellent. It runs kinda hot, but I knew this would be the case.
SLED 10 sucks donkey balls. It made me jump through registration hoops
before I could install security updates, it's package manager seems
really slow (could be the CPU being sluggish) and I haven't worked out
how to install extra packages yet. I tried to install gnome-games but it
keeps asking me for the installation DVD which didn't come with it and
there aren't any extra software repositories set up so I can't install
Thunderbird. I googled for SLED 10 package repositories and came up with
a page on the Novell Wiki which linked to various Novell project
specific repos for OO.o and Banshee, plus their build service and links
to OpenSUSE repos which came with the warning that mixing SLED and
OpenSUSE packages should work but might lead to dependency hell. I'd be
grateful for anybody else's knowledge here. I feel like a beginner again.

I swapped the SLED 'slab' menu for the traditional Gnome menu but the
layout is awful and displays the same apps under different menus, in
some cases there are 2 entries with the same name for the same app in
the same sub-menu. YaST is a horror and doesn't tell you what the
generically named icons do and there a separate, less useful Control
Centre for no apparent reason. BBC news website flash video playback was
pretty choppy. Oh and there's nowhere to change the font settings or
desktop appearance.

I don't plan on keeping SLED anyway, it's outdated and I'd like to see
whether the CPU or SLED is to blame for making it drag when doing
package updates. I tried an Ubuntu 8.10 live CD on a USB stick but it
hangs while drawing the GDM screen, I believe this machine contains
hardware for which Free drivers are patchy. 9.04 alpha 5 is coming down
the line right now but I might try the latest OpenSUSE or taking Chris
E's Mandriva recommendation.

Bitter complaints aside, I'm still happy I bought it, the screen and
keyboard are excellent, but I'll be happier when I get a different
distro running on it.

> Cheers,
>  
> Jim (a LUG lurker)

Lurk no more my friend :)

Regards,

Adam Sweet

- --

http://blog.adamsweet.org/

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