[Wylug-discuss] Recommendation: Linux-compatible Netbook Under GBP 250?

[Paul Brook]

> 1. Bootable via USB --- preferably with dual-bootability
> 2. Basic multi-tasking --- simultaneous multi-tab browsing + text
> editing + ssh without screen-lag

Any new machine should me more than capable of this.

>...
> I really don't care about having Linux pre-installed --- Android or
> Windows would probably do.

A few points that spring to mind:

I'd avoid anything Android based.  These are almost certainly ARM based, 
rather than a conventional x86.  While this isn't a bad thing per-se, it does 
mean that you're dealing with random embedded hardware rather than a regular 
PC architecture.  Android is nominally a linux kernel underneath but usually 
includes significant closed source components so don't expect regular linux to 
work on them without a lot of fairly involved hacking.

Aside from that there's very little variation in core netbook hardware.  
They're all Atom based.  CPUs come in three variants:

- Regular N series.  This is the vast majority, certainly if you're looking at 
the lower end of the price scale.  Pretty much everything works out the box.  
Graphics are sufficient for flashy 3D desktops, but not a lot else.
- Z series. Use PowerVR graphics shipset, which has no viable linux drivers. 
Avoid like the plague.
- Nvidia Ion.  Pretty much what you'd expect. i.e. graphics are substantially 
more powerful, but you get all the pain associated with proprietary drivers.  
Worse battery life.

Atom CPUs have gone though a couple of different revisions, you can probably 
find people flogging the old ones at reduced price.  Performance is 
approximately the same.  The main difference is that the old (N2xx) chips 
drink battery substantially faster than the newer (N4xx) ones, and the new 
ones support 64-bit mode (so you can run the same OS variant as all your other 
machines).  I've never used the dual core variants, but believe the additional 
core doesn't consume that much extra power.  Bear in mind you've already got 
hyperthreading, so you probably wont get much benefit from the additional core 
unless you can keep 3-4 virtual CPUs busy simultaneously.

Memory tends to be limited to 2G (this is a limitation of the atom chips).  If 
you want more, then you're looking at a small laptop.  These tend to be a bit 
bigger (>=13"), much more powerful[1], less good battery life (approximately 
half for a given battery size), and more expensive.

Personally I love my EEEpc (slightly older 1005PE but I believe current models 
are approximately the same).  I replaced the HDD with a 32Gb SSD[2].  I don't 
notice much performance difference as I never turn it off (suspent to ram FTW) 
and the CPU is probably the bottleneck for encrypted filesystems.  It did 
noticably improvebattery life.  Doing the replacement was rather involved, but 
there are good howtos with pictures online.  Given current HDD price insanity 
you can probably ebay the old drive and end up in profit :-)

Paul

[1] A typical Core i3 supports as much ram as you can physicaly fit (~8G), 
does roughly twice as much per clock cycle, runs at twice the clock speed, has 
two cores, and the onboard graphics are much better.  i.e. Overall performance 
about 8x that of an atyom based netbook.
[2] If running windows you loose most of this to the OS, which probably 
explains why they don't ship as standard.  The average linux install comes in 
at <8G leaving a good amount free.