raymac46 Posted June 11, 2012 Share Posted June 11, 2012 It's a long story. Back in early 2009 when I was already doing a lot of stuff with Linux, my daughter expressed some interest in trying it out. I thought the best thing to do was get her to buy something with Linux pre-installed. This was back in the days when you could get netbooks that ran Linux, and Dell had one that looked really great. It was called the Mini 12 and on paper it seemed perfect - Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 40 GB hard drive and Ubuntu 8.04 preinstalled. It had a nice 12 inch 1280X800 display and a pretty good keyboard. So I recommended she get one. What a mistake this turned out to be. Dell was only paying lip service to pre-installing Linux on netbooks (they weren't the only OEM to do this.) They took what was a slow Windows Vista machine with unfriendly wifi and a very bad proprietary video chipset and kluged their own version of Ubuntu 8.04 to make it work. There was no upgrade path to regular Ubuntu or any other distro that would not break the video. In addition Dell gave the machine a dumbed down interface that was weird, not intuitive and unlike either Gnome or KDE. Anyway my daughter used this machine for a year. She never blamed me but it was obvious she didn't like it and soon she got a more powerful notebook running XP and the netbook went to gather dust in a bedroom closet. In the meantime Mandriva had some smart video guys that got the Dell video driver working, and I was able to take the netbook and install Mandriva 2010.0. That was a huge improvement, but future versions of Mandriva didn't work with the driver and eventually the only thing that you could use was the Vesa driver at a suboptimal 1024X768 resolution. My daughter wouldn't have wanted that. The whole thing seemed hopeless until early this year when the kernel hackers at Intel finally got a decent 2D driver put right into the Linux kernel. You still can't get any sort of 3D effects but the 2D driver is fast and sustainable. Things really started to go right with Ubuntu 12.04. I installed the Xubuntu version on this little netbook and Wow! Native 1280X800 resolution, beautiful graphics and a really nice little machine after three years of frustration. It's now what it should have been when Dell sold it originally. Of course I now feel guilty because I really should give it back to my daughter. She says she doesn't want it, but I'm sure she'd love it now. I guess guilt is always part of being a parent. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted June 11, 2012 Share Posted June 11, 2012 Excellent that you managed to get it working beautifully even though it took a couple of years for support to come. There is not reason to feel guilty as she did not use it anymore and bought herself a much more powerful machine. I would show her how much nicer it runs now and let her decide but I have a feeling she still will not want it as she went through a lot of frustration before with the machine. You had no idea that Dell would provide such a horrible experience on the netbook so that part is not your fault either Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted June 11, 2012 Author Share Posted June 11, 2012 Here's a look at the desktop from the Mini 12. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted June 11, 2012 Share Posted June 11, 2012 Look great!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted June 11, 2012 Share Posted June 11, 2012 Pretty kitty! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted June 11, 2012 Author Share Posted June 11, 2012 (edited) Well we do travel together a fair bit and I always take the netbook so she gets to use it for email etc. If she ever asks I will return it at once, but since she has an iPad tablet and the notebook I doubt she will want it returned. Pretty kitty! It's a web photo but it does look a lot like Sammy. Edited June 11, 2012 by raymac46 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted June 12, 2012 Share Posted June 12, 2012 Of course I now feel guilty because I really should give it back to my daughter. She says she doesn't want it, but I'm sure she'd love it now. I guess guilt is always part of being a parent. Yes, but usually it applied by the child to the parent. Your situation is a bit different. You entered into this with good intentions. I say, no foul. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted June 12, 2012 Share Posted June 12, 2012 You entered into this with good intentions. I say, no foul. Agreed Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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