This was a rather pricey business machine when Dell released it some four-and-a-half years ago. It was designed for Win7 and comes with a surprising array of added goodies, but no Bluetooth. You can find these things in good quantity on Ebay, Amazon, and other online shops. While most of them seem to run about or just over $100 US, I found a vendor offering a decent version for $89. While powered by the lesser of the two CPU options (Intel Atom N455), it had a full 2GB RAM. By the way, Linux says that the processor is dual-core at 1.66 Ghz.
You can get it with Windows, and I’m sure the key on the bottom works with any Dell Win7 installer DVD, but this vendor installs Linux Mint on their machines by default. That’s fine, but it was a huge mistake to select the Cinnamon Desktop for such a low-powered device. When you first fired it up, you are asked to select your language, keyboard, and give your account a password. This one uses the “sudo” method for administration, meaning no active root account. But as soon as the thing comes up with the GDM login screen, it’s running a constant slide show of different background images that takes up all the processor cycles. The lag time between what you type and what you see on the screen is intolerable for logging in. The desktop itself was just slightly less laggy, but some functions took so long to come up you might think the machine never got the click on the icon. They should have chosen the XFCE or LXDE desktop by default for lightweight machines.
I plugged in an external DVD-RW drive (there’s no room for an optical drive on such a small machine) and booted in plain old Debian. Given the specs (under 4GB RAM) I thought it might be worth trying the 32-bit version, but I couldn’t get it to read the hardware properly. Using the 64-bit (AMD64) installer worked fine. An Intel Atom is just a smaller and lighter Intel CPU, and is not a different architecture. I recommend you use the Debian installer CD that includes all the non-free firmware to reduce hassles during installation. This netbook requires the Broadcom firmware. Get the CD here (and typical 32-bit version here). You will need a USB mouse during installation because the installer kernel doesn’t recognize the touchpad. Once installed the touchpad works quite well.
During the installation routine, you’ll get a chance to select a desktop “task” and I chose the XFCE, of course. LXDE would work as well, but I’d avoid GNOME or KDE.
Once it’s up and running, everything seems to work just fine. That huge 57wh battery adds a bump to the back of the machine, but they make it work like a small lift, which gives the deck a slight tilt that most folks prefer when resting on any hard surface. The body has a rubberized coating not found on most laptops. The keyboard it a little tight but functional; with a little use to accustom myself, I can see writing even longer documents on it. I do find having the power cable and ethernet cable on the right side just a little odd, but it’s no big deal. With vanilla Debian and a lightweight desktop interface, it feels just about as snappy as any newer machine.
Addenda: FYI, this is what my desktop looks like. I put both toolbars vertical (“deskbar”) on either end.
(Click to enlarge.)
Update: I couldn’t get the 32-bit installer to work with Debian, and eventually the doggy slowness of the 64-bit caused me to search a bit. After testing a few different ideas and OSes, I’ve settled on Linux Mint 32-bit. The installation was flawless and everything works just fine using the built-in process of first testing the wrong driver, then replacing it with the Broadcom STA driver for the wifi.
I’m running Mint 17.3 32-bit with KDE (4.11.11). Mint 18 with Plasma 5.6 was insufferably slow. I’ve tried LXDE, but didn’t see enough improvement in the performance to justify the loss of KDE’s additional functionality (look around – there’s a lot performance improvements that can be made to KDE beyond the default settings). As long as I don’t open a bunch of programs at the same time, the box runs fine.
Let me recommend a major display tweak (I autorun it at startup from a a bash script.)…
If you prefer, you could use 1280×768 with scale 1.25×1.28, but I just can’t stand ANYTHINGx600.
Note – the processor is NOT dual-core…it is a single core that runs in two 833 MHz threads.
P.S. Got my 2120 off of Ebay for $25 in August 2016.
(Edited by blog owner for display of literal code line.)
To each his own; thanks for the tips that might be useful to others, Richard.
Pesky, automated post editor! In my previous post, the long hyphen characters displayed in front of the option names for the xrandr command, i.e., output, mode, panning, and scale, are supposed to be pairs of dashes. Don’t know what WordPress thinks it’s protecting by changing them.
Yeah, I’ve kinda gotten used to it and didn’t think about the implications or I would have edited your comment appropriately. It’s not a matter of protecting, but presuming to “fix” it for your convenience. In the future, you should post code with <pre> tags around it or use entity codes (as I did to get the HTML brackets). A double dash looks like -- (I went ahead and fixed your comment).