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**