Any feedback from those with experience with System76/Zareason/etc.?

I was thinking about getting a netbook with linux and, based on the results from linuxpreloaded.com, seem to have narrowed it down to System76 and Zareason. Since netbooks are all very similar in specs, there isn't too much of a difference between their current models. The differences are as follows:

Teo Netbook: $399.00
Graphics & Video Module Intel® GMA 3150 (shared system memory)
Battery Pack 6-cell Battery included
2.8lbs
160GB SATA HDD included

Starling NetBook: $389.00
Graphics: Intel GMA 3100 graphics
Battery: includes one 3 Cell Lithium Ion
2.0lbs
250 GB 5400 RPM SATA II

That seems to be it just going from the spec sheets. It would appear that the Teo has better battery life because of the 6 cell at 8 hours while the Starling only comes with a 3 Cell giving it around 4 hours. I know that System76 has a sub-forum on Ubuntu-forums for support and has added driver support within the OS itself to make some things work. I'm not really sure about Zareason.

Obviously what I would like to know more is the overall quality of the products as well as any other factors that would put one over the top. Does anyone have any experience with these specific devices or just with the companies and products in general? One thing to note is that the Starling apparently just got a refresh and I don't know about the Teo. I probably won't be actually buying anything for awhile so right now I'm just researching. If there are any other companies out there that I could consider please let me know.

 

Well I actually found out from someone who bought a Teo that flash performance isn't that great. Unfortunately that is a deal breaker for me so that pretty much rules both of these netbooks out. I guess my question then becomes, does there exist a netbook (or similar product) that is completely compatible with linux out of the box that also has excellent flash support.

It looks like Intel graphics cards aren't that great as I also have a intel card that gives poor performance in flash. Youtube seems to run alright, but other sites like Hulu are very choppy even in a window. Are there any graphics cards out there in small form factor laptops that give good performance in flash? Thanks for any help.

 

Intel 9-series graphics are notorious for choking under fullscreen flash, and unfortunately so is the NVIDIA driver in Linux. In my experience ATi has been the best for flash with their proprietary fglrx driver, Intel second, and NVIDIA's proprietary drivers worst. There are ways around the chopiness of the NVIDIA cards with flash, but even on a high performance system it is worse than could possibly be understandable. On a netbook the problem isn't just the IGP, it's also the CPU bottleneck. I've had luck getting around this by using Chromium instead of Firefox on netbooks since it loads both Hyperthreading pipelines to spread the load. If you step out of the netbook space and into an intel ultra low voltage processor segment, you will get acceptable performance on flash with their integrated GPUs, but they are more expensive and larger than a netbook. See the ASUS UL20A for an example...

 

Hm interesting. I think I could give a little bit on the size but I would prefer something more around the 400-450 price if that's possible. As long as it has a video card that will be compatible with all the standard video formats found on the web and preferably decent 3d support. I wouldn't mind having to edit some stuff to get it to work in Linux as long as theres a straight forward tutorial somewhere I could follow. If you or anyone else could recommend anything I would greatly appreciate it.

 

The Intel CULV (consumer ultra low voltage) stuff starts around $500, you might be able to wait and get a UL20A at a better price when the UL20AT comes out soon.

For others, check out this list:
Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Keep in mind that the SU* series are better than celerons, and the i5 is the best and latest, but most expensive.

Some of these SU* models are Core Solo (single core) -- don't be fooled by those. Also the SU* processors don't have hyperthreading to make up for being single core, unlike single core Atom CPUs.

Lastly, some of the models using CULV processors use NVIDIA Optimus, which currently has no support for Linux, so if you need good 3D support in Linux, steer clear.

 

Ok I guess it looks like the UL20AT uses a 64-bit processor then? I read that 64bit Ubuntu and flash have some fairly major issues so is there an easy way to resolve that? Should everything else work well or are there other things I should keep in mind?

 

Yeah, that is true, but you can manually download and install an older version of 64 bit flash, which is what I did when it was discontinued. It works fine on all my systems, with the exceptions I mentioned earlier.

For the U and UL series (and others), there are some problems with the touchpad not being recognized with kernels prior to 2.6.34, and I've written an extensive guide to fix this here:
[ubuntu] Elantech touchpad improperly recognized as “ImPS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse” - Page 5 - Ubuntu Forums

 

Alright well I'm still on 2.6.32-24 and I'm not really aware of how these things roll out. When will 2.6.34 come out and can I just download it on 10.04 or is that only available in 10.10? I'd rather not have to deal with a new set of problems on 10.10.

I ask this because looking at your instructions I'm not sure if I will be able to do that myself. Would going through the steps on another computer with Linux allow me to practice to make sure they work? I can't really afford to get a new laptop and then not have the pad work. Sorry, as you can tell, I'm a noob.

Also, you mentioned that chrome helped with its hyperthreading support on netbooks. Did it make flash comparable to running on windows or was it just slightly better than it was? Thanks for your help.

 

2.6.34 has been out for some time now, and 2.6.35 was just released. I'm not sure when it'll get to Ubuntu, but you can always install a kernel package separately, or better yet, read a howto guide and build it yourself.

If you try the instructions on a different computer, it won't have the touchpad that the patch applies to, so it's not really worth doing. I wrote the guide to be extremely verbose -- there is almost no thought required. But if you install 2.6.34 or later, all you have to do is create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf that contains only the line: options psmouse force_elantech=1

Chromium improves a lot of things on netbooks, not just flash video... but nothing can make flash comparable to windows, because its Linux support is notoriously horrible, and the developers have a reputation of making rambling excuses.

 

Interesting. I'm on nvidia gpu with proprietary driver on OpenSuSE, and never experience such problem. Care to share a link about nvidia flash stuttering?

 

This problem is as old as time itself, just do a web search. Some systems don't suffer from it -- I've only had one mobile NVIDIA system that didn't require fiddling to get flash video working smoothly fullscreen.

 

I think this depends on a number of factors, my nvidia system doesnt suffer from this bug.

 

Is that your desktop system?

Which browser/version you use is a big factor, in addition to the NVDIA driver version. This is sure to be a sore subject for anyone who has used Linux with NVIDIA for a long time, so I'll leave it here. It's a dead horse.

 

I'm not able to get search results that relate nvidia gpu to flash stutter. A lot of flash stutter.

 

Yeah, but it's the same driver, no?

I know more about ATI than nvidia

 

Indeed sir, but I haven't noticed as much of a problem with desktops, especially GPUs before the 7-series. Anway, if you don't experience it, great! One less headache.

This query worked for me:
-windows +linux nvidia flash fullscreen choppy OR stutter OR jerky - Google Search

For anyone else who isn't experienced with this, there are a couple of workarounds, besides having lucky versions of flash/browser/drivers... for nvidia, disabling compiz, preloading libraries, disabling GPU acceleration of all things... for intel, removing the GPU acceleration check in a config file. Also, it seems to be an issue on mostly 64-bit machines.

 

I actually just had a really obvious thought. While an older version of flash may work for 64bit at the moment, won't there be a time down the line where it just stops working completely for whatever incompatibility reasons? What would I do then?

 

There could be a time when that happens, if they don't release a new version ever. They are supposed to pick up development at some later time.

If the 64-bit version of flash stops working for some reason, which is unlikely but possible, you can use the 32-bit version with nspluginwrapper, which is the old way of using flash on 64 bit systems.

 

for that reason I use a Dell Vostro 1220 with x4500 intel card as a netbook....it's very fast, but will cost ya....linux is fine on it, it's what I use it for.