HP mini 311

I wanted long battery life (something I could write with on trips, the train), and something to run Linux on.  Most of the netbooks out this summer (2009) had screen resolutions which didn't suite them for making presentations at meetings, conferences, etc.  Even worse, they seemed to be most usable with so called "Netbook Remixes"  of Linux (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora) which tried to make presentations more readable on the small, low resolution screens.

The 311 offered an NVidia chipset, an HDMI output port, and better resolution, while still holding reasonable battery life (and - at least for my preferences - the HP had a usable keyboard).

To save money, I got a basic, in-stock version from Amazon (no shipping costs, etc. made that the best cost option).

I had a Hitachi Travelstar 7200 320G drive, which happens to be conservative for standby power (better than the 160G drive that came with the 311).   I added 2G RAM, which brought the total RAM up to 3G.

Access to the drive and RAM areas couldn't be nicer - see http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/HP-Mini-311.htm for some nice pictures.

I started out with a clone of my Ubuntu 9.04 system (a dd copy) - it seemed to work and update fine, but the touchpad would not be recognized by the mouse driver.   What I mean is the touchpad worked fine, but there was no "touch" controls in Ubuntu, so that tap-to-click was always active, and made any typing a significant challenge (as the cursor would jump about quite readily... really, it's a great touchpad).   In Windows, I was able to disable the tap-to-click feature, and then could both navigate and type usefully.

I tried all the "regular" suggestion on the web to get the touchpad recognized, but to no avail.  On one trip, I let Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) "upgrade" overnite, hoping this might help.  It made my system totally unusable (wouldn't even boot - no keyboard; a real disappointment on a meeting trip!).   When I got home, I did a "fresh" install of Ubuntu 9.10, and that is what I run now - it worked fine, but did not help with the touchpad.

Finally, I found a workaround here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1316361

I added these aliases:

alias touchoff='sudo modprobe -r psmouse'
alias touchon='sudo modprobe psmouse'

This successfully disables the touch-pad altogether, but leaves USB mice working fine.   I added a little IOGear Bluetooth 2.1 USB Micro Adapter (model GBU421; I got mine at CDW).  My favorite mouse worked right away.

The above mentioned thread seems to now have some working / hacked version of psmouse (with added hardware identifier), so no doubt there will be better solutions soon.   For now, the aliases give me the control I want, without any worries about upgrade conflicts or problems.