I recently bought a $300 Dell Inspiron Mini 10v and loaded Gentoo on it. I thought it might be a good idea to give an account of my experiences.
Purchasing. Buying from Dell directly was kind of nice, as they allow you to custom select what components you want, such as whether you want an SSD or a regular hard drive, how much RAM you want, etc. Being a poor collegian, I went pretty much with all the cheapest options. Shipping seemed pretty good to me -- something like $10 for second-day. And I was able to purchase it with Ubuntu preloaded, which is a little less expensive than the Windoze option. (Though of course I immediately installed Gentoo.)
Hardware. I was overall quite satisfied with what I got. The biggest plus, and the ultimate reason I finally decided on a Dell Mini, is that it is the quietest portable computer I've ever owned. I purchased the regular hard drive, and so I can hear the hard drive spinning sometimes if I hold my ear really close. But since the Mini 10v does not use a fan for cooling, it is otherwise completely silent. Also for what I paid, I thought the specs were good -- 1.6 Ghz Atom dual core, with 1 GB of memory, plus the wireless card, three USB ports, a video port, and about three hours of battery life (at moderate CPU usage.) The keyboard was fairly comfortable for its size, and the 10'' screen was workable for me.
The only two complaints I have as far as hardware: For one, the touchpad is worthless. Somehow they tried to combine the click buttons and the touch surface into one seamless unit, and it did not work at all. So I carry along a portable USB mouse.
Second, the top cover picks up fingerprints very easily. This doesn't affect function at all, but it is kind of embarrasing when you are showing off your Linux netbook to all your Windoze buddies.
Installing Gentoo. This process overall went great. I installed Gentoo using the minimal install disk, all from the command line. I used full hard disk encryption plus LVM, and I had no troubles there. I'm running Xfce4 for the desktop, and that works great for me.
I don't recall needing any special kernel options that weren't already selected by default, aside of course from my encryption and lvm options. Not of all the Dell special keys do something for me, but the brightness adjustment keys seem to work fine. I suspect more of the special keys would have a function if I was running KDE or Gnome instead of Xfce4, but since I don't need them it isn't an issue.
Remember when installing Gentoo that you need to be using the most recent installation CD and stage package. I ran into some confusion at first because my Ethernet NIC wasn't working, and I found out this was because the older 2008 installation CD did not have the driver.
Wireless. I did run into some frustration initially in this area. The problem, however, was not that Gentoo wasn't running the wireless card correctly -- rather, it was running it in a way I didn't expect. When trying to activate wireless, I was looking for a device called "wlan0" or something close to that. But Gentoo registered the device as "eth1," which I am guessing means that Gentoo somehow emulates the wireless device as an ethernet device. Once I realized this, it was a simply matter of using the iw tools and dhclient with the eth1 device, and I was able to connect just fine.
CLAGS. The CFLAGS/CPPFLAGS I settled on for the make.conf file:
Summary. Overall, I am pretty happy with my purchase. Affordable for my budget, and yet powerful and functional enough to meet my school and work needs. At work I connect it up to a spare keyboard and mouse, and it becomes for all practical purposes my office workstation. I was concerned before buying that I might have trouble getting the hardware to work with Gentoo, but so far I haven't had any unresolved issues.
Purchasing. Buying from Dell directly was kind of nice, as they allow you to custom select what components you want, such as whether you want an SSD or a regular hard drive, how much RAM you want, etc. Being a poor collegian, I went pretty much with all the cheapest options. Shipping seemed pretty good to me -- something like $10 for second-day. And I was able to purchase it with Ubuntu preloaded, which is a little less expensive than the Windoze option. (Though of course I immediately installed Gentoo.)
Hardware. I was overall quite satisfied with what I got. The biggest plus, and the ultimate reason I finally decided on a Dell Mini, is that it is the quietest portable computer I've ever owned. I purchased the regular hard drive, and so I can hear the hard drive spinning sometimes if I hold my ear really close. But since the Mini 10v does not use a fan for cooling, it is otherwise completely silent. Also for what I paid, I thought the specs were good -- 1.6 Ghz Atom dual core, with 1 GB of memory, plus the wireless card, three USB ports, a video port, and about three hours of battery life (at moderate CPU usage.) The keyboard was fairly comfortable for its size, and the 10'' screen was workable for me.
The only two complaints I have as far as hardware: For one, the touchpad is worthless. Somehow they tried to combine the click buttons and the touch surface into one seamless unit, and it did not work at all. So I carry along a portable USB mouse.
Second, the top cover picks up fingerprints very easily. This doesn't affect function at all, but it is kind of embarrasing when you are showing off your Linux netbook to all your Windoze buddies.
Installing Gentoo. This process overall went great. I installed Gentoo using the minimal install disk, all from the command line. I used full hard disk encryption plus LVM, and I had no troubles there. I'm running Xfce4 for the desktop, and that works great for me.
I don't recall needing any special kernel options that weren't already selected by default, aside of course from my encryption and lvm options. Not of all the Dell special keys do something for me, but the brightness adjustment keys seem to work fine. I suspect more of the special keys would have a function if I was running KDE or Gnome instead of Xfce4, but since I don't need them it isn't an issue.
Remember when installing Gentoo that you need to be using the most recent installation CD and stage package. I ran into some confusion at first because my Ethernet NIC wasn't working, and I found out this was because the older 2008 installation CD did not have the driver.
Wireless. I did run into some frustration initially in this area. The problem, however, was not that Gentoo wasn't running the wireless card correctly -- rather, it was running it in a way I didn't expect. When trying to activate wireless, I was looking for a device called "wlan0" or something close to that. But Gentoo registered the device as "eth1," which I am guessing means that Gentoo somehow emulates the wireless device as an ethernet device. Once I realized this, it was a simply matter of using the iw tools and dhclient with the eth1 device, and I was able to connect just fine.
CLAGS. The CFLAGS/CPPFLAGS I settled on for the make.conf file:
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=core2 -mtune=generic -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"These were loosely based on some recommendations I found on the Internet. So far I haven't had any problems.
CPPFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
Summary. Overall, I am pretty happy with my purchase. Affordable for my budget, and yet powerful and functional enough to meet my school and work needs. At work I connect it up to a spare keyboard and mouse, and it becomes for all practical purposes my office workstation. I was concerned before buying that I might have trouble getting the hardware to work with Gentoo, but so far I haven't had any unresolved issues.
