We recently bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a sub-notebook with Ubuntu Linux and a 9″ display. That’s pretty small and the main idea behind this is to use it as a laptop for the kids. An adult can hardly type fast on the small keyboard, but I guess the kids will have a lot of fun with that machine. So here is my review.
The most refreshing aspect of this machine and for me personally a blocker if it would be different, is that Dell ships Ubuntu Linux 8.0.4 with that notebook. The total price was 420$ and that inclided a 5GB SSD (solid state disk, no conventional hard drive) and a 1.3 MP webcam built into the screen. I also bumped up the memory from 512 MB for the cheapest version up to 1GB which mad it some dollars more expensive. Windows would cost you more and who actually does need it by now? I’ve been working on a Mac at work the last couple of years and all my software by now is in the cross-platform/Java category. That kind of software runs both on Unix-based Macs or on Linuxes without any issues, switching back and forth from a Mac OS to Linux and vice versa is really easy.
For my daughters user account, I left the special Dell UI installed. It is an application chooser that features really big icons and makes it easier to choose your app as the selection is right on the desktop. Something I guess my daughter will soon understand and once she finds it boring I just deactivate it ans she can use the typical Ubuntu UI.
Especially for kids, the Mini 9 is awesome. Some free Tux-Games like learning the alphabet, numbers or this Tux snowboarding game are preinstalled and you don’t have to search and install it. Just turn it on and you will find some cool stuff. Of course, it comes with Wifi and as an extra with Bluetooth. I am not too sure if the Bluetooth option was a good idea, but Wifi of course is a must have. The connection to our home network was trouble-free and we were watching some full-screen YouTube videos soon after unpacking the laptop.
The 5GB SSD is of course not much. Right now we got around 3GB left but I think every user only gets a quota of that space, have to figure out how to change that. I bought a 2GB SD Card for the SD/MMC slot and put some music onto that card, which is a good solution for now. Most things anyway are on the web today, like word processing on Google Docs or online videos on YouTube, so a large disk for our use cases is not really needed.
