01 January 2010

Experience with Ubuntu Karmic on ASUS EeePC 1201N




Asus EeePC 1201N specs:
Display:  12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixels
CPU:        1.6GHz Intel Atom N330 dual core
Graphics & chipset: NVIDIA ION (GeForce 9400M)
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
Memory: 2GB DDR2
Storage: 320GB HDD
Wireless : Realtek RTL8191SE
LAN: Atheros AR8132 Gigabit Ethernet
Bluetooth:
I/O: HDMI, VGA, 3 USB 2.0 ports, SD card slot, mic, headphones
Webcam: 0.3MP
Touchpad: Supports multitouch gestures
Battery: 6 cells 

After a saw how Windows 7 works on it i decided to install Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala x86 edition.
Problems:

1. Installer could not detect any networking card (no wifi no lan). So, after it completes , i have booted with acpi=off kernel parameter and LAN began to work ! Very strange because i only need it once.

2. WiFi card is not known by current kernel so you have to download the drivers from here (Realtek site). Uncompress the file and install the driver withe these commands : sudo su; make; make install; reboot;
Also, the WIFI performance is very bad. 

3. The networking is unreliable (os crashes on large file transfer) i think  because of this bug: nForce2_smbus conflicts with ACPI region SM00. Let's hope that they will fix it soon. 

4. Under normal usage the battery lasted  only for 3,5 hours, not 8!

Good stuff: Everything else works as expected ! :-)



On this netbook, Ubuntu Karmic, with all this problems,, it's a much better experience than Win7!