It is finally here. I had been watching the market for small netbooks for a long time. Since one offer is always followed by another, at some point I simply had to take the plunge.
My initial enthusiasm for the Asus eeePC faded when I first had the device in front of me. The keyboard was far too fiddly, and the 7-inch display too small. So it had to be a different device. I decided on the MSI Wind U100.
And here is the little beauty.
Note my wife's small cup to the right of the device, to give you an idea of its size. The netbook feels really solid.
It is quite quick to work on, too. Inside the case is a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, supported by 2 GB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive. The hard drive is not solid-state like the one in the Asus eeePC. But that does not really matter, since solid-state technology is not yet mature enough to actually save power under load.
For connectivity, there is a standard network card (RJ45) and a wireless adapter (b/g). Bluetooth is also available.
Other extras include a 4-in-1 card reader and 3 USB ports.
Since the netbook weighs about 1 kg, it is easy to carry around. All in all, a stylish device.
The device ships with Windows XP. A few things are already preinstalled, such as Acrobat Reader and a 30-day trial version of Microsoft Office. But that was an immediate reason to install Ubuntu straight away and free those 80 GB from the filesystem from Redmond.
Thanks to Akoyabuntu (http://forum.msi-wind.de/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=904), the installation could be carried out quickly using a USB stick. After about 10 minutes, I had the Ubuntu desktop installed on the hard drive.
The first impression was very good. Almost everything worked straight away. The webcam delivered a good picture. Sound was available immediately, too. Only the wireless connection did not work out of the box.
After I installed the driver from the included CD on the netbook using ndiswrapper, all the networks appeared in the preinstalled WICD. My joy was short-lived, though. The card simply refused to connect to WPA networks. The solution was to install the Linux driver for the network card, which fortunately exists.
The driver can be downloaded here:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/16098501/rtl8187se_linux_26.1016.0716.2008.tar.gz
Apart from that, I only had one more problem. After inserting an SD card, Linux wanted to mount the card under /media/cdrom0. This was caused by Ubuntu's default entry in fstab. The device does not have a CD-ROM drive anyway. So I simply commented out the entry. The card reader promptly worked perfectly as well.
Overall, I am delighted with the device so far and can recommend it without reservation.