Answers to: Which netbooks have hardware well supported by Ubuntu?

Answer by Kurtosis

Kurtosis — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:26:34 -0400

Ubuntu Netbook Edition on just about any netbook. I've been running it on my Asus EeePC 1000HE flawlessly for months now.

I hack Scheme, Google Go, and Ruby in Vim on it, can run Eclipse but almost never do. The usual email + social networking works fine too.

UNE is optimized for Atom processors, and designed to maximize the available screen real estate of small netbooks. Hardware Compatibility List here.

Answer by Alan

Alan — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:16:06 -0400

I have a 1201n EEE PC running 64 bit Lucid and its the most pain free Linux experience I've ever had.

Cost about $400. Good battery life and generally a nice clean experience. Only thing Id say is its not great for development ... just a bit too slugish and you'll want 8 times the screen space for development! (but those remarks will be common to all netbooks I reckon ... better off getting a desktop for that).

Answer by camorri

camorri — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:36:40 -0400

For what its worth, I have a HP Mini 210. Everything worked out of the box with Ubuntu 10.04. I had to set up the passphrase for the wireless, that was it.

Answer by Martin Filtenborg

Martin Filtenborg — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:28:21 -0400

If you can live with the small screen on a netbook, anything will do. You may even think about getting one of the older Asus models with SSD-disk. These are cheap and rugged. I'm running Ubuntu Netbook Edition on a Asus 901, and it provides mail, browsing, text processing, 2D-cad, photomanagement and a few other activities like viewing movies while traveling, extracting photos from my cellphone via bluetooth and generally helping me out in situations away from home.

Asus claims 8-hour battery life, which is not true - i'll get 5 hours or so, but i've turned on all the eyecandy i can find and wlan is always on. But nonetheless, it has revolutionized my computing experience. Knowing that from opening the lid and hitting space, it takes me 5 seconds flat to get productive. I'm telling you - it's blisteringly fast! And when i'm done, just closing the lid will put the machine to sleep again. This has brought computing to a new level. Example; ever been watching a movie and wanting to know this or that about e.g. an actor, but didn't want to go through the paces of firing up your slo-mo-stationary PC in the next room to search for facts on the 'net? No more. Just reach for the sleeping netbook... I haven't had mine shut down for the last month or so - i just top up the battery every other day.

As stated above, the Asus 901 sports an SSD-disk offering 16 GB of storage. Sure, but i kinda like the cute little WinXP that lives there, so i've popped an 8GB micro-SD card in the machine and had my Ubuntu live there. Works like a charm :)

I cannot understand why anyone would ever think of putting a 160 GB mechanical harddrive in a netbook. It's not needed, it's powerhungry and it's fragile. All wrong!

So: My recommendation would be to get a Asus 901 and put Ubuntu Netbook edition on it. Everything works out of the box! I've even installed Skype on it and had video+audio work - just like that.

Don't like the 901? Grab an Asus 10"-model. Or an Acer-thing. Or a Lenovo. Just make sure it's not all-new on the market, has been sold in large quantities and that it features 'all-day-computing'. Then, chances are that Ubuntu Netbook edition will fit right in and 'just work'.

Answer by guerda

guerda — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:10:59 -0400

Lenovo S10-2. I bought it for 299 € and it works perfect with Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

Answer by hunter

hunter — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:43:39 -0400

anything Just Use the Net Book Version of ubuntu