Got my hands on a new Samsung N220 Netbook. It came with Windows 7 starter pre-installed which isn’t ideal and so I decided to see how well Linux would fare. For the initial experiment I downloaded Kubuntu (Karmic) and made a live USB install. After moving the USB boot option up in the bios (turn on the Netbook and press F2), it booted up just fine and presented the normal KDE desktop.

Out of the box, this is what was working (or not):

  • The trackpad and both mouse buttons behave as normal
  • Wireless: Not Working
  • Ethernet: Working
  • External monitor: Yes but only to the extent that an image was trying to show. My monitor was shredding the image and flickering. I should note that my monitor is a 24″ widesceen monitor so it’s quite possible that this was an issue. Will update this if I test on a more sensible screen / projector.
  • Graphics are using VGA, will test more later as the Intel Pineview graphics chip looks like it’s supported in the xf86-video-intel 2.10.0 driver
  • Bluetooth: Working
  • Sound: Working
  • Microphone: Not working (tested using Skype)
  • Webcam: Working (tested using Skype)

With this all in mind (no wireless) I decided not to wipe off WIndows quite yet. I used the Windows partitioning tool to shrink down the C:\ drive partition so that I could make a dual boot system. I the installed Kubuntu and rebooted into the nice new system. After this I connected the Netbook to my wired network and got online. I installed ndiswrapper and retrieved the RealTek wireless drivers from the Samsung website. After doing this the installation of the drivers was very straight forward. I found that I could find the local networks in the area but had lots of trouble connecting to my router, which is one of the better wireless routers on the market. As such I carried on searching and came across this page. The part of the page that is of interest is:

#wireless
#Realtek RTL 8192E Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC
wget http://www.dirk-hoeschen.de/temp/rtl819Xe.tar.gz
tar xzf rtl819Xe.tar.gz
./install.sh
#modprobe r8192_pci
iwconfig

I did not have to run the final two lines as KDE kindly informed me that my wireless card had been found just after I ran ./install.sh. I’m not actually sure why as I didn’t run the command as root so YMMV. With this driver the signal from all networks was noticeably higher than it was when using ndiswrapper and connection to my home router was quick and without issue. All in all a very happy result!