!# on the Dell Mini 9

Hi All,

I have just joined and I have been using !# for about a week it is installed on my new Dell Mini 9 1.6Ghz Atom, 1Gb Ram/8Gb SSD, after looking through this and various other forums I thought I would share with you the wonderful tricks and tips I have found and compile them into a useful document.
I decided to use !# over the installed Dell Ubuntu or even the official Ubuntu as having a full Gnome desktop with Open Office etc seemed overkill for a machine that I was mainly going to use for surfing the web.

Install

I followed the install guide on the ubuntumini site using the !# lite ISO instead of the standard Ubuntu.

Hold the zero key at boot selected the 1Gb USB flash drive as the boot device and opted for manual partitioning creating 2 partitions 2.5Gb for root and the rest as /home using ext2 for both filesystems. There are differing opinions as to whether you should configure a SWAP partition/file, some say the use of SWAP space will shorten the life of the SSD others say that the SSD controller programmed to avoid this, which ever is true if you want your machine to hibernate you need SWAP space equal to the amount of RAM installed. I didn't bother standby mode is enough for my purposes.

Once the installer had finished I rebooted and applied the fix for the sound also shown in the install guide, with the next reboot the following worked:

• Wired ethernet

• Wireless (using the Broadcom driver installed by the restricted hardware app)

• Webcam

• Card reader

• Audio out

• Touchpad

• Standby / Resume

The Tweaks

The !#CrunchBang desktop works well on the Mini 9 with just a few extra tweaks to maximize space on the 8.9" screen. Apart from the Conky config these tweaks will probably be useful for other netbooks and not just the Dell.

Changes to Firefox:

• Install the TinyMenu add-on, this allows you to collapse as many of the menu items you choose into a single icon, I have left the Bookmarks menu untouched for ease of access.

• Hide the Bookmarks toolbar.

• Use the Customize option and select Show: icons and check use small icons, and while the customize window is open drag all the icons from the Navigation bar to the Menu bar then hide the Navigation bar.

• I have also installed AdBlock and NoScript to stop annoying ads filling your screen.

Changes to the default OpenBox config rc.xml:

• Set a 2 pixel margin on the left hand side of the screen to allow access to OpenBox menus at all times.

<margins>
    <top>0</top>
    <bottom>0</bottom>
    <left>2</left>
    <right>0</right>
</margins>

• Set the Firefox browser window to start maximized with no window decorations, other Firefox windows appear as normal.

<applications>
    <application class="Firefox" role="browser">
          <decor>no</decor>
          <maximized>yes</maximized>
    </application>
</applications>

Changes to the default OpenBox autostart.sh:

• Removed LXPanel from the autostart.sh file and replaced with trayer, I prefer to use alt-tab to switch applications.

• Stopped trayer from always staying on top of other apps.

 (sleep 2s && trayer --expand true --transparent true  --alpha 255 --edge bottom --align right --expand true --SetDockType false --widthtype request --margin 10) &

Changes to Conky config:

battery $alignr ${battery_percent BAT1}%
CPU speed $alignr ${freq_g}GHz

WiFi cannot get the WiFi details from the Broadcom driver

Other changes:

Replaced powernowd with cpufreqd to manage the processor speed and save battery life, the Mini 9 is fanless so it's nice and quite but can get a bit hot, using the ondemand speed governor the CPU can switch between 800MHz and 1.6GHz depending on load, when the battery drops below 30% then the CPU is fixed at 800MHz. Follow the instructions here and use the following CPU module.

acpi-cpufreq

If you are going to connect your netbook via a public WiFi connection it's probably a good idea to turn the default firewall on:

sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw default deny
sudo ufw logging off

The default policy is set to drop unknown incoming connections.

I have set this to start automatically at boot up, using the rcconf tool, this can also be used to stop any unwanted services running, doing this will potentially speed up boot times and reduce memory usage.

sudo apt-get rcconf
sudo rcconf

Stopping the trackpad whilst typing due to the small size of the keyboard and close proximity of the trackpad this might be useful for some. adding

syndaemon -i 1 -d

to the autostart.sh script seems to work.

Performance

The Mini 9 has pretty much the same specs as other netbooks, it's main use is for browsing the web and checking email without having to start up my main desktop PC and so far I am very pleased with the way it performs, using VLC I was able to watch some DVD rips stored on a USB hard drive in full screen without any problems.

Some useful site for the Dell Mini 9

http://www.ubuntumini.com/
http://mydellmini.com/

If any one has any ideas about where I can find the WiFi details, iwlist does not work but the Ubuntu Network Manager is able to connect and report the stats, so it must be available somewhere.

Last edited by xploded (2009-01-28 14:39:50)