TR Forums

I've got a Toshiba NB205 netbook. It came delivered with Windows XP Home, which worked ok, but I am not fond of the stripped-down version of XP. I then upgraded the thing to Vista Business SP2, which ran fairly well on the thing, but the battery life was not so hot. After a few weeks of that, I then installed Windows 7 RTM from my TechNet subscription. Aside from the goodness of the 7 taskbar and the window behavior, there was little improvement in the battery life, and the interface is still not really designed for such a small screen (1024x600). Incidentally, performance was about the same between Vista and 7 - it wasn't bad, but there wasn't a huge improvement. :/
I am now considering putting a netbook-friendly Linux install on it, and I'm hoping to hear from someone who may've tried doing the same thing on the Toshiba. It's a pretty standard netbook (1.66 Atom, 2GB DDR2, 120GB disk, 1024x600 screen), but it uses an Atheros wifi chipset. I briefly toyed with Open Solaris on it (OSOL 2009.06), but even an updated driver for the Atheros did not want to work reliably, and I was still stuck with a GNOME installation that seemed to expect a screensize larger than 1Kx600. I don't care if the distro has a launchpad or not, as long as I can get to a terminal. I would like a GNOME-based desktop, because I am quite happy with GNOME VFS and mounting various and sundry 'filesystems' (such as sftp and of course the ubiquitous smb shares) to make it easier to work with remote files. I'm not opposed to KDE 4, but I haven't really seen any distro that tries to leverage KDE4 for the netbook market, and I don't have any idea how well KDE handles something like mounting an sftp connection to the standard directory tree. I'm not opposed to trying it, however.
I guess I'm hoping to hear from someone who knows of a Linux Distro (or other *nix, for that matter) that is reasonably netbook friendly - dialogs don't display 'OK/Cancel' buttons off the screen because the display manager doesn't really understand 1Kx600, reasonable power friendliness, and support for Atheros WiFi. I can (and have) looked at spec sheets until my eyes cross, but that doesn't really tell me if such a distro is actually acceptable to use. I suppose that's why I'm posting here - hoping someone might have some experience with such a beast, and can relay their impressions, etc.

I suppose, if worse comes to worst, I can use one of my coveted XP Pro OEM installs on the netbook, but the stuff I use the netbook for is pretty platform-agnostic, and I'm willing to give something else a shot if it will do the job.

*edit: I forgot to mention that I have an external DVD ROM to use for installation, so I don't need something that uses one of the flash-based installers. Just a plain ol' CD or DVD will not be a problem for me.

Give the Ubuntu Netbook Remix a shot. It doesn't work perfectly with your model yet, but there are a couple workarounds here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport ... shibaNB205

You could try the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It apparently has known issues with the WiFi and sound on that model, but there are workarounds for these issues.

No idea whether battery life is any good; notebook battery life under Linux seems to be somewhat hit-or-miss depending on model, and I imagine netbook battery life is roughly the same story.

Edit: D'oh, bthylafh beat me to it by seconds...

the workarounds look pretty mild - I'm giving the thing a try.

Thanks!

you might want to give the 9.10 alpha a try too. I've just given it a go on my Aspire one and it seemed a lot snappier to use and the wifi light started working too!

seemed pretty stable

Hi,

Did you manage to get Ubuntu working ok on the NB205? I'm looking to get a NB305 which is a similar machine but only want it if I can get Ubuntu working ok - can live without suspend/resume for the short term but need it not to hang etc.

Any info appreciated.

George

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1382481

Looks like it should work OK, though the wifi might take a bit of fiddling to get working well.

If your concern is battery life, Linux will not improve the situation. Linux and Windows are fairly close in terms of battery life.

If your concern is performance, Linux will probably help, as it uses far less memory than Windows, which frees memory for caching, which tends to accelerate things. If you are willing to build binary packages in a virtual machine and then bring them over to your netbook (or just let stuff compile on your netbook), I recommend Gentoo Linux. It is an awesome netbook operating system once everything finishes compiling:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/h ... xml?full=1

Everything tends to have less bloat on Gentoo as a consequence of its USE flags. You can also set the compilation flags to match your system, which you cannot do with binary distributions like Ubuntu Linux. Given that you have an atom, I suggest setting your CFLAGS to "-Os -march=prescott -fomit-frame-pointer". You could also add "-pipe" to hold intermediate files in memory (so assembly code is not written to the disk and then read from the disk by the assembler) and assuming you have the graphite optimizer for GCC installed (via USE flags), you could enable "-floop-interchange -floop-strip-mine -floop-block" to aid with vectorization.

You also probably would want to install ccache to speed up subsequent compilations (e.g. you change your USE flags) and possibly also put /var/tmp/portage on a tmpfs filesystem, which functions as an expandable RAM disk, to keep the build process entirely in memory, although you might not have enough RAM to do that. I have 2GB of RAM in my laptop and some times it is not enough (when compiling netbeans or openoffice), so I have to unmount /var/tmp/portage to put the build process back on the disk.

Also, I suggest adding ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" to your /etc/make.conf file. It will make sure you have the latest packages upstream declares to be stable on your system without having to worry about removing soft masks because Gentoo's package managers have not yet cleared it for use on Gentoo.

In addition, I suggest installing the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, and then stripping out all of the debugging stuff from it so you build a lean kernel specifically for your netbook. Make sure you enable kernel pre-emption (as well as RCU pre-emption) so you do not get random lag issues in whatever desktop environment/window manager you choose to install. Binary distributions tend to leave that disabled, so you will get random lag issues with them that you would not get if the kernel was compiled differently. Thankfully Gentoo requires that you compile your own kernel, so you aside from the learning curve, you should not have any issues. Make sure you compile your filesystem (I recommend using ext4) and storage drivers into your kernel, not as modules, or the kernel you compile will not work. Also, be sure to disable the high resolution timer, it is a CPU hog.

I hope that helps.

I wouldn't recommend using Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the nnb205. I have the nb205, originally installed with WindowsXP. I backed-up all my data, got the install files installed properly on a USB stick, re-formatted and installed it. The Wi-Fi worked right from the start, no work-around stuff, but the audio is only available through the headphone jack (I had it installed a couple months ago, so there might be newer drivers). The Fn shortcuts don't work, obviously, but I didn't mind. Overall, I just didn't want it installed anymore.

Now, The Toshiba nb205 comes with a small partition at the end of the hard drive that has a restore utility that will reformat and re-install windows clean, or reformat and re-install to an out-of-box state. I had the WORST experience trying to get that partition to boot. It would show up in the boot list, but Windows was missing a file, I found the file, but couldn't access the partition through Linux to copy it, all this ridiculous run-around for nothing... My favorite was when it said my HDD was not found. All I really had to do was use gparted to set the flag to the restore partition and boom, it was up and running. My WinXP re-install experience is different from many others, mainly because I used the Linux installer to resize my partitions, which from previous experience, I should have known not to do.

Anyway, if you want to try it, look for a Live version to give it a test-run, or read about how to dual-boot properly because it is a pain to get back when you don't have access to a CD-ROM.

I haven't used it myself but there is EasyPeasy

This is another netbook OS based on Ubuntu. There is a screenshot tour here

This is an old thread, but I thought I'd mention this anyway: you might want to give a MeeGo a try. It is a Linux operating system developed by Intel and Nokia. Phoronix just did a review of it, comparing it to Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 LTS, Moblin 2.1, and Fedora 13 among others.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... perf&num=1

http://www.meego.com/

I have a toshiba with the same specs, NB305. It came with xp, I wiped it clean then tried the ubuntu remix, mint, & suse distros.

They work well but the computer had the problem of not being able to revive from sleep or hibernation. I researched the issue and basically came up with no fix as of now, people are just dealing with it. The ubuntu remix had extreme difficulty booting up.

Otherwise they work ok.

I was frustrated with the battery life with the various distros they average about 5-7 hours due to the lack of the power management software that toshiba puts out. they are able to adjust processes for battery life if you download the right drivers from the toshiba website. Not for linux though.

I currently have version of windoze 7 ultimate installed with the right drivers installed and get average of 10 hour battery life and extremely fast boot times. the sleep function works nicely as well.

I would try the windoze 7 with the right drivers until the linux distro comes out that will work correctly.