I’m living the dream, I tell you! I’ve swapped my MacBook for a Dell Mini and so far the experience has been pretty positive. For anybody wondering about whether to get one or not, below is a collection of my thoughts:

Customer Service – e.g. Buying From Dell

Great. Ordered over the phone, and after mentioning that I was a student in one part of the conversation, I got a discount in another – an extra year’s warranty for £12 seems like good value to me. Also, the sales rep asked me if I needed the machine by a certain date, which I did, so they gave me priority order status and got the machine to me in under 5 days, compared to the advertised 15!

The other nice touch when buying over the phone with Dell was that the sales rep gave me his own extension, so that if I had any problems I could talk to the same person.

The Machine & Fedora

Fedora 9 fails to boot on a standard install as the kernel doesn’t support the network adapter used on the Atom motherboards, but more recent Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 kernels do. This leaves you with three ways to get Fedora installed:

1. Install rawhide
2. Create a respin of Fedora with the latest kernel and Anaconda updates from Unity
3. Disable the ethernet in the bios for installation and update the kernel afterwards by downloading it from koji

Obviously, because there’s no optical drive you need to put your installation media onto a USB stick.

I opted for number three, and it worked perfectly.

The other major problem with the hardware is that the wireless chip is from Broadcom (bcm4310) and it doesn’t yet have a free driver, with the only support coming from ndiswrapper at the moment. Fortunately, wireless is provided by an easily accessible PCI-E slot, and I’ve just ordered an Intel 3945 from eBay for £7 which will work with free drivers.

Everything else seems to work perfectly: the webcam, the randomly placed function keys along the A – L row of key, bluetooth etc.

The Hardware Itself

Seems really well put together so far. It looks pretty nice, the hinge on the screen is extremely sturdy and the mouse buttons are placed exactly where you’d expect them to be, with a nice responsive mechanism underneath. The mouse pad is a little sticky feeling, but it seems to be getting better as I use it, so maybe that’s just because it’s new.

The keyboard is what concerns people most with these machines I think, but I’m happy to say that I could touch type on this almost straight away. The only keys that are giving me any trouble are the arrow keys and the right shift key, but I think I’ll get used to them soon. It’s not, however, a keyboard that I’d like to use as my primary system, and as I’m intending to use this as my primary machine, I’m buying a wireless keyboard and mouse.

I’m also buying an external monitor for use with it, as although the integrated screen is really nice, displaying everything I’ve thrown at it wonderfully, it is a little bit small for extended use.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with it to be honest! I think it’s going to turn out to be far more practical, and make travelling a lot more pleasurable. I’ll post with more thoughts and feedback as I progress with the system, in what is admittedly a bit of an experiment to see how easy it is to live with a netbook as a primary machine.

To anyone who’s wondering about buying one (Max!), I’d definitely recomend it based on my experiences so far.