Dell Mini 9 Running Ubuntu

A while back my tablet died. However, I was getting by with my work laptop, but the thing is huge and long ago realized I liked how small my 12″ tablet was. One of the limiting factors to what I could get was cost. So i started looking and found that netbooks would probably fit the bill for what I needed. I don’t “need” to code on the go I have a nice desktop for that. Basically I just want to take notes, check email, etc… you know normal people stuff.

After doing some research it looked liked the Dell Mini 9 was a good fit as it was cheap and could be ugpraded easily later on down the road. Unfortunately, $200 was still a bit to high so I finally gave up for a while. Well the other day my mom bought me one out of the blue as a surprise present, and I think to play with it herself on our vacation next month. While dell doesn’t sell them through the front door of their website their backdoor has a big stock. So I got a refurbished Dell Mini 9. Dell’s Backdoor

So lets take a look at it shall we.

So this is how it looked when it came.

And when I opened the box. I know these aren’t very good pictures but Fedex guy delivered it 2 hours after I went to bed. I wanted to get pictures of opening it, I wanted to see it and I wanted to go back to bed all really quick.

First thing I pulled out of the box.

And the second thing. Notice the Ubuntu disc. Even though it is 4 versions old Ubuntu.

Here it is out of the box. Notice the standard sized Dell keyboard behind it.

So now that we have seen it lets get some Tech Specs:

• 1.6 Ghz Atom Processor
• 1 gig of ram
• 4 gig Solid State Drive
• 0.3mp Camera
• 8.9″ Display
• 4 cell battery
• Now Running Ubuntu 9.04 with netbook remix

In order to install the newer Ubuntu I needed a jump drive so I went and found a 16gig one for 40 bucks. Here are a couple of images of it running remix ubuntu. See if you can name the anime of the wall paper.

Pretty isn’t it. Very very bright when it needs to be and suuuuuper light weight.

Notice the size compared to the can of Monster

So one of the things i was reading about the Dell Mini 9′s is they are more capable than people realize because intel integrated the north and the south bridge for their atom processors. As a side effect it is capable of running 720p H.264 video. That being said not just any decode works. With some research the best decoder is CoreAVC, but it isn’t free and it is windows only.

Not to fear there is a way to bring CoreAVC over to linux. Here is a Guide to getting CoreAVC on Ubuntu. After going through that. I got it up and running and the above anime is Hyakko which is 720p and a rough one at that meaning some computers that can play 720p will churn a bit with that one. Dell mini 9 played it fairly well.

Here is another 720p anime running pretty good and is an action anime so it is a good test to be sure. It is Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro. I still have a few quirks to work out with watching other video, but 720p is good to go.

I do plan to upgrade to a 32 gig ssd and 2 gig of ram, but we will see what happens. For now though I have a netbook that can do everything I need it to do.

Oh and everything works well out of the box on ubuntu. I was surprised. I only “needed” to jump into command line to do the coreavc+mplayer thing and that was because it was compiling from source. Now to get back to studying Japanese and Discrete math and finis up a couple of blog posts I put on hold because of getting my new mini.

As  final note. The Dell mini 9 does run OSX out of the box. Can just be a bit interesting to install. Here is an image of it running, but it is not my mini.

Tagged as: Technology