Working on a Netbook

Well, day #3 with working from a netbook and so far things aren't too bad.

Getting the broadcom driver installed using Jockey was a little painful, mainly because I required network access via the Ethernet NIC but for some reason the PCI address space for this device did not get configured correctly unless one booted with acpi=none. Once I had figure a work around, installing the proprietary driver was a breeze.

I'm using the netbook on my desk with a 22" Iiyama flat screen monitor at a resolution of 1680x1050 using the HP mini video -> VGA dongle as shown below:

Not too bad, except for that fact that output has a very slight green tinge to it, which is a not brilliant.

The video dongle is tricky to get hold of, and is required because the video port is a rather slim connector. So, a saving on space on the netbook using a smaller form factor video socket means that we need a special VGA cable which adds more cabling to my desk.

When being used in "desktop" mode, I use a full sized USB keyboard and a wireless mouse, but these use up all the two available USB ports. This is a pain when I want to copy data to USB pen drives; the solution is to use a USB hub but this leaves me with a few more cables on the desk.

Speed wise, it's OK for Email, and Web browsing, I'm used to a speedier laptop so it's a little painful at times when I want a snappy response, for example, editing photos for this blog in Gimp is a bit of a memory and CPU killer.