Dell Mini 10 and Crunchbang
Over the past week and a bit, I’ve been playing around with Crunchbang Linux on a Dell Mini 10 netbook. The experience has been entertaining at least and Crunchbang works surprisingly well once you get it configured.
Out of the box, Cunchbang is a fairly minimalist desktop environment, using Openbox and Tint as the desktop and window manager. A bit of tweaking to get menu sizes reduced and it takes up even less space on your desktop. Since vertical space is at a serious premium on this thing, the biggest challenges were getting Firefox and Thunderbird configured to make the most of the tiny screen.
On Firefox, I’m using Full Screen (not necessary in Firefox 3.6, of course), Tree Style Tabs and a combined menu and toolbar to clear up some pixels. Reduced font-sizes from the default make browsing more manageable even when I’m not in full screen mode.
Thunderbird 3.0 was a bit trickier. In the advanced preferences pane, under the config editor, set mail.tabs.autoHide to True to get rid of the tabstrip if there’s only one tab showing. I also found the header area in the message pane was taking up a lot of room, so I installed the Compact Headers extension to take care of those. You will need to disable compatibility checking through Nightly Tester Tools or the config editor to get it to work with Tbird 3. (Thanks to wswmk in irc for the tips!)
Whether I could live with this as my main portable is another matter. The trackpad on the thing is pretty poor, requiring a really light touch to tap-to-click. There are no real buttons on it, but the two bottom corners act as left and right mouse clicks if you press the trackpad down — it clicks. Because the pad itself is so sensitive, this invariably moves the pointer off of your target and you’ll get a misclick. Even more amusing is the right-side scroll wheel. If you’re on the desktop in Crunchbang, this is interpreted as a “jump to workspace” action, randomly skipping you through your desktops. It took me awhile to realize I was doing this accidentally and that it was a feature.
Other interactions between OS and hardware are pretty good. With the exception of networking. Connecting to a wireless network is a bit of a crapshoot. I can connect at home on a wirless G network with WPA2 passphrase, but it takes too long to negotiate initially. I could not connect to my parents’ network after multiple attempts and they have a basic WEP passkey. I installed wicd as my default network manager after failing with Network Manager and it seems a little better, but still slow.
In short, networking in Linux still kind of sucks.
But sound works! And the included A/V apps in Crunchbang are decent if not awesome. VLC works really well and after struggling with SMB to get network shares working, I can even stream stuff off of my fileserver. Also includes Rhythmbox and Audacity among other open source audio-video apps. No Songbird though?
Overall, it’s a fun little machine to hack around on. Screen’s probably too small to do any development, but works just fine as a little internet toy or writing machine. That it’s entirely an opensource software stack helps too. I wrote this post on it, and genuinely like the keyboard (after flipping the Caps Lock and CTRL keys). It sure is portable.
6 Comments
[...] 2009-12-27 20:13:24 The rest is here: n3wblog – Dell Mini 10 and Crunchbang var addthis_pub = ''; var addthis_language = 'en';var addthis_options = 'email, favorites, digg, [...]
Posted by n3wblog - Dell Mini 10 and Crunchbang | High technology information on 28 December 2009 @ 12am
I’ve been eyeballing the Minis. Once I get my craft/work room area sorted, I want to set up my laptop as my desktop. It’s too big and heavy to heft around much, and for my web-browsing, recreational computer use I’d prefer something smaller and minimal in weight.
Any opinions on how it compares to others on the market?
Posted by Melissa on 10 January 2010 @ 8pm
Hi Melissa.
I can’t find the exact quote right now but it goes something like this: “any laptop under $500 is going to be complete crap”. While that’s a bit harsh, it does help to lower your expectations when you look at netbooks.
That said, I think Dell minis are pretty decent little machines. I like mine quite a bit, despite the crappy trackpad which takes a lot of getting used to (ideally: turn it off and use a USB mouse). The keyboard is surprisingly good for its size. Screen real-estate is probably the biggest limitation on any netbooks and if you can find one with better resolution, you’ll be better off. I had to do a lot of customizing to get things like Firefox and Thunderbird squeezed into the tiny screen.
but look around. I’m sure there are a bunch out there. Maybe go poke around in a Best Buy or Futureshop. They have pretty excellent return policies so if you buy something that doesn’t work out, you can take it back and get yourself a dell.
Posted by boolean on 11 January 2010 @ 10am
Ok, PLEASE tell me if you were able to configure the trackpad? It drives me nuts not be able to right-click properly.
Regards,
Earl
Posted by Earl on 14 January 2010 @ 9pm
hey Earl,
Um, how do I break this to you? No! I haven’t been able to configure the trackpad. Maybe there are some better drivers and options in Windows, but under Linux, I’ve got nothing. I’ve managed to kind of train myself to be really careful when I’m using the right click area on the trackpad, because otherwise I will misclick, open a menu and select “close” or any number of other amusing accidents. I’m about, oh, 80% accurate at right clicking now, which is, pretty super awesome, imo!
seriously. Get an external mouse.
Posted by boolean on 14 January 2010 @ 10pm
[...] commenter asked about the horrible touchpad on the Dell Mini 10. Not sure if he was using Linux or Windows, but a [...]
Posted by n3wblog - Dell Mini 10 with Ubuntu /Crunchbang touchpad issues on 14 January 2010 @ 10pm