I finally bit the bullet and for £245 bought a Toshiba NB200-13L from Amazon, to augment my compute capability; it seemed wise to buy a model which had a little age on it – other people have solved most of the problems you’ll encounter installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it.

Experience so far is good, though there have been a few “aha!” moments along the way; the short list is:

– you may see only two partitions in the partition tool, but there are actually three; more advanced partitioning tools will detect a 1.4Gb “Vista” Hidden-NTFS partition at the end of the disk, containing restoration files

– restoring windows using the standard tool dumps a pile of stuff into the D-drive; this is *not* the same as the restoration partition, not least that it’s 70Gb in size, ie: half the disk

– i blew the d-drive away and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix (Karmic/9.10) in there

– i didn’t create a swap partition, choosing instead to use a swapfile so I get some dynamic sizing, and also don’t disturb the restoration partition (which I dd’ed into a file on the C: drive, for good measure, and also backed up the D-drive contents for safety’s sake. Not like I will use Windows much, so making good use of that 70Gb seems like a good idea)

– you need to disable linux adaptive clock rates in grub; I did this before replacing the kernel so it may be moot, or it may not, but doing this sped the machine up dramatically.

– if you want sound and decent wifi, you need a new kernel at which point everything works reasonably sensibly

– if you’re an advanced GNOME hacker, you can do a better job of optimising vertical screen real-estate by hand-hacking your panels and by using Google Chrome as a browser. To do this you will have to re-enable default GNOME and disable UNR like this.

– I decided to splurge on a decent input device to complement the go-anywhere netbook; after the recent BoingBoing review I bought a Logitech Anywhere MX mouse, and it really *is* that good.

– Using drag and drop on the Firefox bookmarks editor made GNOME hang. Twice. Not so bad, except Karmic Ubuntu has removed the ability to kill the X server via Ctrl-Alt-Backspace for usability reasons. This led to reboots, since I was not on my home network. To re-enable X-server zapping, see here under “GNOME”

– an upgrade to 2G of RAM will cost me about £35 and will put this machine on-par with my MacBook Air, but less beautiful, with a smaller screen, a lot more hard work and unix hacking, crossed fingers, patches, and worse software integration.

It took me 7 hours to make this machine usable under Ubuntu. That’s why I am not dumping the Mac.

But it’s still cool. Next thing to-do: Virtualbox.