For quite some time I was again and again tempted to get myself a new more decent netbook - up to now I just had one of the first of such kind, an Asus Eeepc701 which is now a little outdated ;)

Beginning of this week I could not resist anymore and got myself a Samsung NC10 plus for 279EUR - the "plus" is pretty important since the older NC10 is pretty different.

For the hardware interested is a small inventory of the built-in peripherals:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation N10 Family DMI Bridge
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation NM10 Family LPC Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH7 Family SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family SMBus Controller (rev 02)
05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller

Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:219c Broadcom Corp.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0ac8:c33f Z-Star Microelectronics Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Review

Short: Nice!

Longer: For this really very little money you really get a good value. The case looks and feels good, the display is bright (and non glare!), with 1GB RAM and 250GB harddisk enough storage. Also the built-in peripherals are nice - three USB2.0 ports, SD/MMC cardreader, 10/100 LAN, 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0+EDR (which is pretty uncommon within netbooks) and a webcam - well, it is not much more than that.

The keyboard is also a very pleasant surprise - I already had much more expensive notebooks with much worse keyboards. This one has a nice pressure-point, the key are not too easy but also not to hard and even for the small size typing feels like on a big machine.

One important detail for me is also the noise that a machine makes. Yes, also the NC10 plus has a fan but amazingly it is almost inaudible! The built-in harddisk can also almost not be heard. So overall this machine is one of the most silent ones I have ever had (exepct for solid-state memory driven non-X86 machines wihtout any fan at all :)

It took me quite some time to get the machine to properly behave though. The machine comes with a Windows 7 Starter version. Well, I do not like nor use Windows but for some things, like a BIOS update, you better have one at hand. So first I ran through the Windows config, updated the BIOS etc. and then started over with installing latest Ubuntu 10.10 desktop version. During installation I resized the Windows partition to minimal size - I know have ~50GB for Win7, that ought to be enough. Samsung also pre-installed a recovery system - nice - which is based on Windows Vista; OMG, one machine and it comes with two differentz Windows versions pre-instaled. I left that on the harddisk too - which pitily leaves just all in all ~180GB for Linux rootfs. Oh well...

Default Ubuntu worked out of the box, even WiFi (I will come back to WiFi shortly). But powersaving was not at its best, the backlight control did not work and especially all suspend modes did not work (no suspend to ram nor suspend to disk). It took me quite some effort to get those issues fixed...

Tips and hints

Kernel 2.6.37

One of the less nice details about the NC10 plus is the WiFi chipset, a Broadcom BCM4313. The chip in itself is OK and also quite powersaving (which is for me the most important feature of a netbook) but the driver situation was for the longest time not so well. Broadcom had a long history of being not too open source friendly, to say the least. This has improved - still not perfect but they at least now release Linux drivers and now also participate in a full open source driver development.

Curently there are two drivers available, a partially closed sourced driver which can be acquired directly from Broadcom, the Linux STA drivers. This one seems to be pretty complete and also has power management but I did not get this to work with a 2.6.37 kernel - it loaded, associated with a WPA2 AP but no IP traffic was possible. Strange.

The second and politically much better alternative is in the staging drivers section from 2.6.37, the "brcm80211" driver. This worked just out of the box and even without proper power management support its impact on power drain seems to be not more than the Broadcom driver with power management - cool!

The reason for failing resumes after suspend to ram or suspend to disk seems to be the by default enabled "Intel CPU idle" kernel feature. After turning this off in my self-built kernel S3 and S4 work just nicely! Just the brcm80211 driver does not come back properly. But it can be made working again by simply unloading and reloading the driver module.

Getting the backlight control to work is a littel trickier though. First of all you need to pass an additional kernel commandline parameter: acpi_backlight=vendor

The NC10 plus seems to implement an ACPI backlight control methode but which does not actually change the backlight. So we must not use that. Instead you need verndor specific backlight driver.