Tell me about Linux and netbooks - battery life, multimedia support, performance

Hey guys,

I'm thinking about buying a netbook (or possibly a small CULV laptop) to complement my desktop replacement G73JH. I'm deployed at the moment, and I noticed a lot of people on the plane ride over here using netbooks...in fact, everywhere I look it seems like people are using them. I had dismissed them before, but I'm realizing that they're a lot more useful than I ever gave them credit for previously. My G73JH pretty much stays in my dorm room...I may bring it into work on slow days/weekends...but for the most part it stays put.

Anyway, I'm very interested in a netbook that can do the following:

Play TV shows/movies for watching on the go
Play HD flash (youtube 720p)
High battery life (8+ hours)

I have my eye on the Asus 1005PR, because it has the 1366x768 screen, Broadcom HD chip, and outstanding battery life. I am aware of the rumors/stories of people getting theirs without the Broadcom HD chip, but I have talked with PortableOne and they said they'd be willing to test one and make sure it has the HD chip in it before they sent it to me (obviously the RMA process would be a pain with me overseas.)

Anyway, I would like more information on the current state of Linux support for netbooks.

Does battery life suffer?
Can I play 720p .mkv videos on them? How's the video codec support?
How about HD flash...isn't it Flash 10.1 (beta?) that allows for acceleration of Flash media to make HD playback possible? Is that available for Linux?
Will Linux support the Broadcom HD chip?

Thanks.

 

Battery life will not suffer much. Windows can get more battery life but on popular netbooks like the Eee PC the combo of custom utilities (Jupiter) and a fresh non bloated install will give you pretty much the same battery life as a stock netbook.

720P mkv should not be a problem, Linux Mint is a distro that comes with most codecs already installed, Ubuntu has most of them available in 'ubuntu-restricted-extras'.

HD flash support will not work and there isn't any planned support for 10.1 at least. Dunno about the broadcom but you would only need it for flash 10.1 (not possible under Linux) and 1080P video (which you would watch on your 720P screen...).

 

Battery life will not be great under a vanilla installation. But yeah, there are custom tools for power management of eeepcs so that you can throttle down the processor, etc. There are even custom distros like eeebuntu made especially for the eeepc which include all of this.

High def formats don't play well on Atom + Linux without some serious tweaking in my experience. But what I've found is that hi def is really unnecessary on a 9 or 10 inch screen. Standard def is just fine and is well supported.

Linux and flash work ok, but do not expect hardware acceleration and/or hi def flash to operate well in Linux as of right now.

My 2 cents:

1. If you have your heart set on the 1005PR, stick with Win7.

2. If you just want something that will play movies on the go, I would think about picking up an older model (maybe a refurb) with lower screen resolution and putting the ton of money you save into a nice rugged ssd rather than a ginormous hdd.

Last year I spent $165 on a 900a refurb and about another $60 outfitting it. I have used various versions of Ubuntu linux and it works extremely well for playing movies and flash on the go. I really don't see the point in paying another $240 to get high def this and that on a 10" screen.

You might want to check mwave.com or search around on ebay for hot deals on refurbs. 23port.com will often ship similar products at much cheaper prices.

 

I was thinking about picking up a used netbook. Are there any brands that are better or worse at running linux? I would probably be putting ubuntu netbook mix on it to start.

 

Get a datasheet/spec sheet for the model you want to buy and then search about Linux compatibility for each one of the components that the netbook has.

I've found this to be a very useful way to check whether some machine is Linux-friendly or not.

Also it wouldn't hurt to install a Linux distro on an USB drive and test it on the netbook you want to buy, if possible.

 

For the most part, most netbooks have the same hardware inside. Rarely is netbook hardware not supported under Linux.

The flash drive seems like a good idea to see if it runs. If you were stealthy, you could probably install it to a thumbdrive and go to Best Buy or something and test it there.

However, there is a slight performance decrease with running from flash memory. I notice my netbook is slower when I'm running from SDHC as opposed to the regular hard drive.

 

My solution for a netbook was to buy the 12 inch DELL Vostro 1220 which makes a great linux notebook....extremely portable and fast, maybe 5.5 hours on linux. I just couldn't read a 9 or 10 inch screen well with trifocals.

 

thats great that you can just copy what somone else posted to up your post count while you spam ads in here and other threads.