On Apr 15, 2015, at 2:28 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote: > > On 4/15/2015 12:55 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: >> I've got a netbook, circe 2009. When I got it, not that I was wild about >> ubuntu, but there was specifically an ubuntu netbook remix. Well, it's a >> few years later - has anyone put CentOS (6, preferably) on a netbook, and >> were there any problems? > > 'netbook' is a mostly obsolete category Yes, but: > They've been largely superseded by the Ultrabook category of 13" ultra-slim ultra-light notebooks. Only among the well-heeled. Your typical ultrabook is around $1,000 today, whereas a true netbook was $200-300. > low power 1st/2nd generation Atom 10" notebooks with 1024x600 screens and 1-2GB max ram, painfully slow. Netbooks were widely misunderstood as “cheap notebook” because they happened to run desktop OSes. The netbook category didn’t turn into ultrabooks, it got calcinated and distilled into tablets and Chromebooks. Those processes left you with a device that *only* did what the original netbooks promised (i.e. cloud terminal) without trying to provide everything we expected from a “real” notebook computer. If you were happy with the original netbooks, I recommend picking up a cheap Chromebook and installing Crouton on it: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton That only currently works with Debian type OSes, but it gives you *most* of the best of both worlds: fast boot into ChromeOS most of the time, with the ability to shell out into a real Ubuntu or Debian environment when you need to. You can get a full desktop GUI if you’re willing to burn the CPU time, RAM, and SSD space, or you can just set up a CLI-only chroot, if that serves your needs. You can run everything off the internal SSD even on even the lowest-end Chromebooks if you only need a fairly straightforward user environment without a lot of user storage space. Much of the OS is shared with the ChromeOS host, and Debian type OSes lend themselves to small-footprint installs. If you do happen to need more than 4-ish gigs of user space, don’t spend a bunch of money on a big internal SSD, unless you’re also going to jump to a high-end Chromebook like the Pixel. If all you need is more storage space, most Chromebooks have SD card readers, and Crouton lets you set up encrypted disk images on the card. With a reasonably fast card, it works fine. Is an Ultrabook running CentOS a nicer experience? Sure, in some ways. But for 3-4x the cost difference, you’d certainly expect that.