About two weeks ago I finally made the decision to buy a Dell Mini 10V,
with the Intel Atom N270, 1GB Ram, 160 GB HDD, 10" display, and Ubuntu Hardy Heron installed.
(On a side note, I really wanted it to be smaller and have more Ram, and of course the next day Dell had the Mini 9 with 2GB Ram and a 16 GB SSD on its website, but unfortunately that was too late).
The system arrived about a week later, everything working right out of the box, WiFi setup was a breeze. The only strange thing was that Dell included a little note stating to set the resolution to 1024x576, but Ubuntu only offered 1024x600 as an option.
I have to say I really like the netbook form factor :-)
Did nothing over the weekend due to family obligations other than run the automatic update and download the latest Java release, Eclipse (both Java and C/C++), the latest version of Firefox and the latest version of Open Office as I knew the internet connection would be dodgy in the hotel.
The next steps from here are:
- get my way around Ubuntu to begin with;
- find out how to format a USB stick (does not seem trivial);
- find out how to install programs (and what exactly is RPM?);
- google ressources on the internet that shall guide me along;
- try "hello, world" with Eclipse.
And all of this with 'asynchronuos internet', that is try something at night, google the next step the next day in the office.
