My girlfriend was looking for a new computer, and some friends had noticed this little Samsung N150 netbook on sale in Sainsbury’s of all places for less than two hundred quid. Sure, it’d need a bigger RAM card fitted but that’s cheap enough. Sounded like a right little bargain to me so I recommended she get that one.

It arrived, and with some excitement was unpacked. And it ran like a dog.

I didn’t really understand why. All my Windows Fan friends had been telling me that Windows 7 was much better than Vista and that it could run on little netbook hardware and that it was as fast as XP and everything in Windows Land was lovely and glorious. Yet here was this machine, taking 30 seconds to launch Firefox. Even WITH it being topped up to be as full of RAM as it’d go.

Needless to say, she was sad and disappointed. I suggested that the problem was Windows, and that it’d be a fine little machine if I installed Linux on it for her. She refused. So I said I’d buy it from her, since I recommended it, and it’d be just great once Windows was removed. She’ll just have to pay twice as much so she can get a machine that’ll run her favorite operating system. I’d be tempted to pay twice as much NOT to have to run it so I guess that makes sense to pay extra to get what you want.

Which left me with a new lappy and no actual purpose for it in mind till I remembered that in the band we’d been talking about being able to do more than just guitar stuff, maybe fire off some loops or samples on demand.

Debian install went easily and other than having to fetch the stupid non-free wifi binary (pah) seems to be working well. That was done easily enough by adding the non-free repo and then “apt-get install firmware-brcm80211”. A step caused coz the wifi card manufactures refuse to let their source out under a free license.

Best of all, I fired up the GIMP, made a little image for it’s wallpaper and then ordered a vinyl decal for the back, which arrived today. So here’s some pictures of my new lovely Debian GNU/Linux machine, which I’ll start taking to band practice soon and may be found on a stage somewhere in London next year.

Only regret is not refusing the windows license and pushing for a damned refund.