Saturday, December 26, 2009

Review: Lenovo S12 Netbook

I recently purchased a Lenovo S12 Netbook mainly for the purpose of running Ubuntu to do Google Web Toolkit programming. Recently I've had some frustration with Java programming for GWT on my MacBook Pro.

My first impression of the S12 was not a good one. It came with a Windows 7 installation that seeming incredibly bogged down by bloat-ware. On the first startup I felt as if I was being barraged right and let by popups and offers and configuration options. Yikes. The first thing I did was to perform a clean install of Windows 7 from a USB flash drive. This went rather flawlessly and subsequently I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix which also was straightforward.

Ubuntu 9.10 did not run well at all until I was able to install the NVidia drivers from the unsupported drivers utility. Using the same utility I also installed the WiFi driver. So far, these are the only two drivers I've worked with. I would recommend having your netbook plugged into an ethernet port if possible when installing Ubuntu.

Moving on to setup of the development environment, nothing could be easier than letting the package manager do all of the work of downloading and installing everything I needed. I let the package manager install the basic Eclipse but then replaced it with the Java EE package from eclipse.org. One problem I have encountered with Eclipse is that there seems to be an issue possibly with the video driver causing the buttons in the GUI to be unresponsive to mouse clicks.

I have not yet tackled getting the onboard camera to function.

Overall I'm very happy with the machine and have no idea how anyone can function without a clean install of Windows 7 or another OS. It is too bad that Lenovo chooses to trash the experience.

1 comment:

jsanca said...

My suggestion for future machines, is buy some HW with the Linux support already included, for instance I know system76.com, is pretty good, it has all the drivers and etc.