The HP Mini 110 Netbook: Almost One Year Later

Last October, after my third Sylvania netbook failed, I took the refund I had received and bought an HP Mini 110 netbook as a replacement. I ordered directly from HP and customized the little machine to my needs, choosing a 16GB SSD over the 160GB conventional hard drive. I also chose to upgrade the machine to 2GB RAM but did it myself with after market RAM rather than pay HP's rather inflated price for memory. My system came preloaded with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and HP's now defunct Mi interface. I've now had the machine for just short of 11 months and I am still completely pleased with it.

In my various articles about since late 2008 I've had numerous comments about how netbooks are really toys, how they are underpowered, how they can't do real work, and so on. I have a one word reply: nonsense! Oh, perhaps they are underpowered when running Windows, a bloated and overly resource hungry operating system. Running Linux, as in any of a variety of distributions, there is nothing I can do with my desktop that I can't do with my HP Mini 110. Video editing? No problem. Compiling software? Yep, just fine. Writing with the little, built-in keyboard? I do it all the time. The netbook isn't as fast as the desktop when I use resource intensive applications, of course, but the portability has made it a constant companion for me.

I also write Linux distribution reviews now and again for either O'Reilly or DistroWatch. The net result is that I have installed and tried probably far too many distributions on the little machine. All of them except for openSUSE 11.2 worked well. (I have not tried a newer openSUSE version yet.) I did find some distros require that a parameter be passed to the kernel in order for the installer to boot properly.

The most frequent complaint I've read online from folks who install Linux on the HP Mini 110 is that some have problems getting Broadcom 4312 wireless to work with some distributions. I've found that Ubuntu works out of the proverbial box and on others I need to add the proprietary Broadcom STA (wl) driver. Some distributions package the driver (i.e.: Pardus) but most do not. If you are relatively new to Linux you probably want to stick to Ubuntu or one of the derivatives that use the Ubuntu repositories. The Pardus wiki also has good instructions for getting wireless and the 3G modem going. If those instructions are clear to you then Pardus is another distro that is quite easy to use on the Mini 110. A more advanced user who is comfortable at the command line, with editing configuration files, and with compiling software should be able to make almost any Linux distribution work well with this system. I am currently using SalixOS 13.1 as my primary Linux distribution on the netbook. That is, as always, subject to change.

It did take me a little while to get used to the keyboard but the small size was not the issue. I don't mind a small keyboard. This netbook actually has larger keys than my old full size Toshiba laptop did but the keys aren't beveled: they are completely flat. Until I got used to typing on the HP I made more errors with this keyboard than I did with the smaller Sylvania netbook. Now that I've had the HP Mini 110 for 11 months I can type at full speed on the keyboard and it seems perfectly natural to do so to me.

The screen on the Mini 110 is bright and easy to read even without my reading glasses. Battery life is OK, at something under three hours, but I have not upgraded to the long life battery pack. I am still using just the stock pack that came with it. The Sylvania was better in this respect.

In summary: everything just works for me and works well. The HP Mini 110 is rugged enough to go anywhere and it has been 100% reliable for me. I like the SSD because the system is all but silent and the performance seems to be every bit as good if not better than a conventional hard drive.

Why write about a discontinued netbook now? Well, for one HP has a very similar model (the Mini 210) for sale. Second, there is always the used market. Finally, I've actually used the thing long enough to write in an informed way. It's a pity HP no longer offers Linux preloaded. If they did I would recommend their netbooks to anyone.

The Ongoing "CentOS 5.3 On A Netbook" Saga

Last week I wrote a feature for DistroWatch Weekly on the trials and tribulations of installing CentOS 5.3 on my Sylvania g Netbook Meso. I was very pleased when Dag Wieërs, a CentOS developer and long time packager and maintainer of an excellent repository of additional packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, posted in the comments section with some useful suggestions and a request that I document how to get the netbook completely functional in the CentOS wiki. That's a project I'll take on when I have everything working to my satisfaction. In the meanwhile I thought it might be useful to report my progress here. That's the kind of thing blogs are for, right?

Anyway, following Dag's suggestion I ripped out the wireless driver I compiled from source and tried to use what CentOS provides. As before that simply didn't work. Then I installed the rt73usb-firmware package from ELRepo. This worked after a fashion. CentOS did recognize my wireless card and, three passwords later (for the keyring and twice for my own WPA2 protected network) I actually was able to connect. I did have one instance since yesterday when NetworkManager locked up, something I used to see in Ubuntu all the time. That, plus the relatively slow performance and all the GNOME dependencies are just a few of the reasons why I tend to truly hate NetworkManager. Unfortunately nobody has a wicd package for CentOS. If I stick with CentOS I will definitely have to package wicd and write a how-to documenting replacing NetworkManager with it.

I also followed Dag's suggestion for installing the kmod-video4linux package from ELRepo in the hope that it may contain drivers for my webcam. No distro supports the webcam out of the box so far as I can tell. Only the factory preinstalled Ubuntu Netbook Remix 8.04 worked without significant effort. Testing with the video conferencing software is a royal pain and possibly not a fair test so I decided to install either wxcam or cheese or both. Guess what? None of the CentOS repos have packages for those either. Grrr!

I did install Xfce 4.4.2 from the CentOS Extras repository and, as expected, it's a bit faster and less resource intensive than GNOME. I'd have liked a somewhat newer version but I'm happy with the results.

I also received an e-mail from Radu-Cristian Fotescu, who writes the Planète Béranger blog, asking me to test his recently rebuilt Odiecolon repository for RHEL/CentOS 5. He has some more up-to-date multimedia packages than other repos so I decided to give it a go. His repo is also known to conflict with the much larger and definitely necessary RPMForge repository. In order to avoid "rpm hell" I am trying to keep things in order with yum priorities. So far it's doing a good job of excluding conflicting packages.

If all this sounds overly complex, well... it is. Back when I wrote my somewhat controversial review of Slackware 12.1 one of the things I complained about was the dependency on third party repositories of variable quality. RHEL/CentOS as a desktop distribution definitely suffers from the same shortcoming. Getting all the repos to play nicely together, even with yum-priorities, appears to be an arcane art. Only time will tell whether or not I've mastered it. I will also need to compile a bunch of apps from source and will probably end up building and contributing significant numbers of packages if I intend to stick with CentOS.

I should also add the performance is still nowhere near as good as my favorite desktop distro, VectorLinux or even as good as Ubuntu Netbook Remix. With further tweaking and streamlining I'm fairly certain I can improve things enough to be reasonably happy.

If it weren't for the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the absolutely dominant business distribution I honestly wouldn't bother with all of this. The main reason for the effort is to be able to use the netbook for business related demonstrations and to have a fairly uniform operating environment for my systems. Check back for further progress reports.

More Kudos To J&R Music World

In my last post I wrote about the premature failure of my Sylvania g Netbook. I also noted that the dealer, J&R Music World of New York City, offered an immediate exchange. I called to follow up this morning and I should have my replacement on the way very shortly. I also am being reimbursed for the shipping and insurance charges to return the netbook. In addition the price has dropper by $40 since I ordered mine and I am, in fact, receiving a $40 credit as well. When all is said and done I will have paid $239 for the computer, a price that is still available today.

First, kudos to J&R Music World for their outstanding customer service. Second, if the new computer works as expected I will have gotten a very capable little laptop for a truly minuscule price. $239 for a system with a 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive is impossible to beat. Oh, and yes, it runs Linux.

The Netbook Experience Is A Little Less Shiny Right Now

During the holidays I received some Hanukkah gelt from family specifically earmarked for buying myself a new computer. The Toshiba laptop I'm writing this on is six years old now, it's slow by today's standards and it has developed a highly intermittent harware problem. Sometimes, out of the blue, it will shut itself off for no apparent reason. Since having a reliable and portable computer is vital for me to make a living right now a replacement was the best gift I could possibly get. A netbook seemed like the perfect solution to me and I ordered the one that seemed to give me the most power for the least money in a very small and lightweight case: a Sylvania g Netbook.

For the first couple of weeks I was thrilled with the little laptop. I was less than pleased with the stock gOS Linux implementation but once I replaced it with a Linux distribution that actually had the proper support and drivers for the hardware I was really, really happy. I used the little Sylvania for everything. Then, like the Toshiba, it started having an intermittent problem. It would lock up for no apparent reason. I went back to the stock gOS configuration and it still locked hard at random times.

I bought the netbook from J&R Music World in New York City via Amazon.com. Kudos to J&R for immediately authorizing an exchange and promising that they would ship a replacement within 24-48 hours of receiving my defective unit. J&R is a long established brick and mortar store that I shopped at when I lived in New York. They have an excellent reputation for customer service and it seems to be well earned so far. They also had some of the best prices on netbooks when I shopped for mine. So... the replacement should be here next week some time.

In the meanwhile I'm back on my old computer. Having worked on the Sylvania for two weeks this one really does seem slow now despite only a small difference in the processor (1.2GHz Via C-7M ULV in the netbook vs. 1GHz Intel Celeron in this one). Of course the fact that the netbook had twice the memory (1 GB vs. 512MB RAM) is probably a big part of the performance difference.

Back in the 1980s I did work for a major electronic manufacturer. I learned back then that 90% of electronic failures happen in the first 5% of service life. What happened with my netbook is just plain bad luck. It could have happened with a Dell or an HP or an Asus netbook. In any case it would have been handled promptly under warranty. I certainly don't blame Sylvania at this point. I really have nothing to complain about. OTOH, it's always frustrating to have something new fail like this. For me, temporarily, the shine is off the netbook experience.

I have written a detailed review of the Sylvania g Netbook for O'Reilly Broadcast but for the moment I'm not publishing it. I want to make sure the replacement works as it should before I publish my opinions on a large public tech forum. I expect the review will go out pretty much unchanged but... Yeah, things just aren't shiny right now.