ScottDickson.net

I got my Dell Mini 9 netbook yesterday. I have always been intrigued by small gadgets. When the netbook craze started I wanted one in almost an “ashamed to admit it” kind of way. I am supposed to be some uber geek and here I want this “toy”. It’s kind of like a guy admitting that you like the 80′s stadium rock band Journey. Real guys don’t like that stuff do they? (I hate to admit it, I do like Journey…I’ll hand over my man card now.)

While the Asus netbooks that started this craze were interesting I really wanted to wait until one came out from a major manufacturer before I took the plunge. I know that Asus is an OEM for a number of big names but I still had concerns and the toylike size didn’t help it either. I’ve always had a preference for Macs but for the Windows machines in the house I generally buy Dell’s. They’re based close to where I live and I have a few aquaintances that work there. When Dell came out with the Mini 9 the cracks  in my resolve began to appear. My resolve gave way completley when tech columnist Andy Ihnatko wrote that he mananged to get Apple’s OSX running on his. He wanted a small, ultraportable machine to drag around in case he needed to bang out a quick article without having to drag a real and expensive MacBook around. I had similar reservations about dragging my $1200 MacBook all over the place. 

I vacilated between buying an new one and trying to get a deal on one from the Dell Outlet website. I started seeing some on the Outlet site for about $219 with Ubuntu linux, 1 gb RAM and a 8 GB solid state drive. The first time one appeared at that price I clicked the Add To Cart button and by the time by browser registered the click someone else got it. This started a cycle of clicking refresh, finding a machine with what I wanted and clicking Add To Cart only to find that someone else got it…again, and again, and again. I was about to give up after about 30 minutes of this when I saw a machine pop up for $209. I clicked Add To Cart after muttering a quick prayer to the gods of HTTP (there was no time for animal sacrifice), crossed my fingers and waited for my browser to register the click. This time, Success!

I ended up with a black Dell Mini 9 with 1GB RAM, an 8GB SSD and loaded with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS. I picked Linux as opposed to Windows XP as I really wanted to see how an OEM configures Linux on a commercial machine. I’ve used many flavors of Linux from Red Hat, Slackware, Knoppix, SuSe, Debian and Ubuntu as well as a few other more obscure distros. In fact, the last desktop machine I bought from Dell I wiped XP and loaded Ubuntu on it for quite a while. 

It’s hard to imagine just how tiny the Mini 9 is just from looking at the pictures. It is dang tiny though. About the size of a hardback book when closed. To get this tiny form factor the keyboard has been shrunk a bunch. It’s not too bad to type on though. The letter keys are about the size of a normal laptop keyboard although there is very little space between the keys. Also, they shrunk the symbol and other keys to little bitty and also managed to stick them in some unusual places. For example, the quote / double quote key is now below the period key instead of above it on normal keyboards. With a little practice it’s not too bad. In fact I typed this entire article on it. 

The trackpad is right up to the front edge of the netbook and the button keys are small, slim and take quite a bit of getting used to. This is probably my biggest complaint so far. That a Flash not working in the web browser. I did manage to get Flash working by using using SWFDEC even though Adobe Flash was already installed. Every time I’d go to a website with Flash content, the content wouldn’t work and I’d get the usual ‘do you want to install Flash’ dialog. Dell is going to have to get this right if they want to sell more Ubuntu boxes to the masses. 

Other than system updates I haven’t installed much on this. My plan is to see how much I can accomplish using web applications and letting my data reside “in the cloud”. It will be interesting to see if I can do it. It will also be fun to see if I can adapt to the form factor as well as keeping this machine away from my daughter. She’s already got her sights on taking it away from her dad. 

Shalom, 

Scott D