[ubuntu-uk] Dell Inspiron Mini 10v

[Barry Drake]

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!

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!

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.

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 .....

What's my involvement?  With the Linux community, very little so far.  
I've been around for years as part of the Sword Project (Bible software 
that is completely cross-platform).  I've done quite a bit of work on 
Windows, Linux, and Windows Moblle.

Barry

-- From Barry Drake (The Revd) Health and Healing advisor to the East Midlands Synod of the United Reformed Church.  See http://www.urc5.org.uk/index for information about the synod, and http://www.urc5.org.uk/?q=node/703 for the Synod Healing pages.

Replies - b.drake at ntlworld.com