minisarriveThe BF and I both ordered Dell Inspiron Mini 9s with Ubuntu, 2GB RAM. 8GB HD and Bluetooth. He was pretty excited when they arrived two days ago.

They came with Ubuntu 8.04 preinstalled with included a Dell interface and a lot of Yahoo branding.  I attempted to connect my Bluetooth keyboard (a ThinkOutside keyboard designed to work with Palm devices) but it wouldn’t make the connection.  I have used this keyboard with Ubuntu 8.10 which I installed on my regular laptop so I decided to install it on the Mini too.  I’m never one to tinker with something that’s brand new (I still won’t jailbreak my iPhone) so this was new for me. After I thought that the install was successful, I realized that I had no sound.  Oh noes!

miniontable

After havng no luck on the Dell website, I decided to just use the internetz to find the answer.  It’s a good thing that I’m not the first to do a clean install of Ubuntu on the Mini.  I found out that the no sound problem is actually to be expected.  It simply requires an update update to a config file to recognize the sound card.  I still have a problem with Samba though but I have this same problem with my regular laptop.

Because of the “issues” I caused, the BF has decided to keep the preinstalled Linux version on his Mini which is great because I get to compare side by side.

In spite of the issues that I created, I really like the Mini.  The screen seems quite large compared to some netbooks I’ve seen.  The letter and number keys are about normal size but the punctuation and other keys are small.  The location of the right Shift key and the apostrophe keys are somewhat annoying.  Because I hit the Enter key when I mean to type an apostrophe.  I’m getting better with using that Shift key though.  I am astonished by how light the Mini is; after using the Mini the first night, my 12 inch laptop seemed very heavy.

This is my opinion after the second day of use so I will have to post an opinion after using it for a while.

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