12″ Karma with Karmic Koala
Friday, November 6, 2009 17:30
It took a couple of weeks (I had to move house) but it looks like I’m at a happy stage with the 1.6GHZ Atom Silverthorne Dell Mini 12, it’s sociably streaming the BBC iPlayer and running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala sharp, clear and snappy at 1280×800. Initial dabbling had me set with Jaunty 9.04 which although more than workable for server development wasn’t delivering the multi-use laptop operating system interface I was after. The GMA workaround under Jaunty didn’t accommodate iPlayer too well and was giving jerky and disjointed playback, not what you want whilst chilling out to the ocean calm of Attenborough’s “Life”.
The truly great thing about the open source community is the speed at which bugs get resolved, a week ago the GMA500 graphics fix for Karmic 9.10 hinged around a convoluted procedure which would most certainly send your generic home user running for the promised land of Windows 7, however a mere few days later and we have a superb “single command” install from lucazade (LINK HERE), nice work fella, respect indeed.
So, yes, after initial system installation and tweaking I bumped up Ubuntu with the usual suspects – Skype, a Twitter client (Thwirl, there’s no Tweetie yet for Ubuntu), Adobe Flash + AIR plus of course my regular LAMP back-end. As it is now the 12’s developed into a real gem for what was only a speculative £259 cheapo from eBay. Unfortunately there was extra annoyance with Wi-Fi after the latest Karmic updates for some reason didn’t allow activation of the STA Broadcom B43 drivers, however once again the community came through quickly with an easy fix (as follows)…
> Go to pool/restricted/b/bcmwl on Ubuntu CD or Live USB. Double click the .deb file & REINSTALL package.
(You would hope this virtual show stopper will be “officially” addressed asap but at least, for now, there’s an easy resolve).
And do I miss the MacBook Air? Dare I admit it, well, no, not at all. The Dell 12 is (roughly) the same size, same screen res and actually lighter than the Air, plus I’m £500 better off. Not to be sniffed at. Obviously it doesn’t run Mac OSX but I didn’t buy it as a hackintosh, I have my real Mac @ home for OSX goodness.
*UPDATE* – I’m actually only £370 better off as now as I’ve just bought another eBay special, well, you know how it is, and £130 was cheap for a G5 PowerMac. Anyone want a G4 Mac Mini? Good price 
**DRIVER UPDATE**
I found everything went pear shaped after the latest updates however the good news is that there’s now no need to use Ubuntu 9.04’s backported drivers (as per the single command link). There are new GMA 500 drivers specifically for Karmic 9.10. Just add the following repositories to the sources..
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/lucazade/gma500/ubuntu/ karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/lucazade/gma500/ubuntu/ karmic main
..then install psb-kernel sources and psb-kernel headers…
sudo apt-get install psb-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install psb-kernel-headers
sudo apt-get install psb-modules
Reboot.
15.12.09 : **WIKI UPDATE**
Recent kernel updates once again send things pear shaped, however there’s now a very good Wiki page up and running which details the ins and outs of how to resolve any issues.
Ben says:
November 19th, 2009 at 1:18 am
Thanks for the update from your original Mini 12 article. I too have a Mini 12 and have found your two posts to be very helpful.
In part thanks to you, I now have Ubuntu 9.10 running on the Mini 12 far better than I ever was able to get 9.04 to run.
I’m also pleasantly surprised with the Flash/video performance of 9.10 on the Mini 12. Maybe the GMA500 won’t be as terrible as I’d been thinking.
Anyway, keep up the posts.
richbos says:
November 19th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Hey Ben, glad I could help, I can’t take credit for the actual fixes though…! I’m just the “conduit”
But yes, the Mini 12’s, mine too is now a gem and I find it’s perfect for my business needs, they’re a great little unit once you get the GMA500 glitch sorted and like you I found 9.10 performance to be much better than 9.04, it’s nice being able to use the BBC iPlayer and it’s only that tinny little speaker which let’s it down, not sure what we can do about that though…!
Best regards
Richard.