[ubuntu-uk] Dell Inspiron Mini 10v

[Bruno Girin]

On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 12:36 +0100, Barry Drake wrote:
> Hi there .....
> 
> I've been lurking and listening for a while.  You seem a friendly group, 
> so I thought I'd leap in.
> 
> A couple of weeks ago I bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v pre-loaded with 
> Ubuntu.  Now I've got it working as I want I have to say I'm over the 
> moon with the product.  But I fail to understand the attitude of Dell.  
> They seem to act as though the only sell Linux products grudgingly.  
> Before I bought, I wanted to know what flavour of Ubuntu I would get.  
> With difficulty, the sales team were able to confirm that it would come 
> with Hardy 8.04.  'What flavour' was a question they simply didn't 
> understand!

Well, I suppose that they consider it a niche product and haven't
trained their staff in answering questions related to it.

> 
> It came with a very heavily customised version of 8.04.  Frankly, I 
> didn't like it a lot, and am now running Lucid beta (Netbook edition) 
> and the whole thing is fantastic!

How heavily customised? Does it come with non-standard software and
drivers or is it just a case of having it heavily Dell branded?

> 
> Also, the Mini 10v only has 8 Gig of hard drive.  Why, Oh why do Dell 
> insist on including a 1.4 Gig recovery partition?  I didn't spend long 
> looking, but never found a way of booting into it!  And the manual only 
> tells how to use it from Windows!!!
> 
> The supplied restore DVD gives no configuration options at all.  If you 
> run it, it re-partitions the HD just as factory supplied.

That's what they'd do with Windows so I suspect they never imagined that
Linux users may want anything else.

> 
> As you can imagine, my system now uses the whole drive.
> 
> Complaints on the Dell forums are always about the amazingly slow speed 
> of the Mini V10.  Mine runs at least as fast as my fairly up to date 
> Windows XP PC.  The complaints usually come from Windows 7 users.
> 
> Dell have a great little Netbook here.  Why must they spoil it?
> 
> Oh, the other thing is I wanted a fallback.  I have a nice little Puppy 
> Linux installed on a 250 Meg card, and I've added partimage to it.  It 
> really is a lovely way of getting back to a stable installation if any 
> of the regular upgrades goes sour on me.
> 
> On a completely different point, someone here mentioned an exhibition 
> where there were some OU folk competing an old Windows machine against 
> Ubuntu ....   A short while back, someone gave me two Pentium iii PC's 
> built for Windows 98.  I was going to strip them down, but just for fun, 
> I tried U-Lite on them.  They turned out to be VERY serviceable, and 
> better than they ever were on Win 98.  It just goes to show .....

I just installed Xubuntu Lucid beta 2 on an old Pentium III (700MHz,
384MB RAM, 8.8GB HDD) and it absolutely flies. Windows 2000 that was
running (or rather crawling) on it until last night would take 1/2 hour
to boot and would be very painful to use. Xubuntu takes 1 minute and 30
seconds to go from "on" to fully logged in with Wi-Fi connected and
makes it a very usable machine: great for web browsing, listening to
music or using the occasional spreadsheet.

Bruno