Nokia Booklet 3G: flawless Ubuntu 9.10
Lately I’ve been using the Nokia Booklet 3G a lot and I can say wholeheartedly this little machine is tough as nails and runs Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala amazingly.
Don’t let the form-factor fool you, this isn’t your run of the mill netbook. In fact I believe Nokia has dubbed it an Ultra-Portable. While some characteristics like the Atom Z530, 10.1″ display, webcam, sd card reader and 1 GB RAM are common amongst netbooks (or “tonka toys” as Matt so eloquently puts it), it has some true gems that set it far apart from the rest of the pack.
Here’s a slashgear unboxing of the Nokia Booklet 3G if you’re into that sorta thing.
How the Nokia Booklet 3G tickled my technolust
* 3G connectivity
* 12 hour battery life*
* Aluminum unibody construction
* 1280×720 display
* 2.76 Lbs & 0.78″ thin
* Bluetooth
* HDMI output
* Quiet passive cooling
* Heavenly macbook-esque keyboard
* Innovative power button placement. No, seriously
Personal experience with the battery
I’m getting about 8 hours in Linux without even trying. I might be able to get a little more out of it tweaking the WiFi radio, turning off bluetooth, lowering the screen brightness or powering down the HDD more often. What’s funny is that when the low battery notification comes on I’ll check and it says “2 hours remaining”. That makes me grin. 2 hours is low. Ha! On my previous netbook 2 hours was nearly fully charged.
What’s not to love?
Comes with the crippled Windows 7 Starter. That’ll be an $80 anytime-upgrade to change your wallpaper, and even more to join a domain. Did I mention it doesn’t have the fancy-pants new taskbar? Not a knock on the hardware but it would have been nice to have Home Basic at least. But then again when it runs Ubuntu so well, why would you want to boot back into Windows anyway?
Supposedly the 1 GB RAM that comes stock on this machine isn’t user upgradeable. I haven’t seen confirmation on this either way but the reports I’ve read so far don’t leave me feeling cheery.
4300 RPM hard drive. Yuck. Sure, I understand the need for a slower drive when trying to squeeze every last ounce of battery life from this machine, but couldn’t a faster 5400 RPM drive with some power saving firmware have done the trick?
No Ethernet port. Thanks for starting the trend Macbook Air. No matter, a Trendnet TU-ET100C USB Ethernet adapter will only set you back $15 and it works flawlessly in Linux right out of the box.
Enough with the review, let’s get into the good stuff…
Tweaks for flawless Ubuntu 9.10 on the Nokia Booklet 3G
After getting Ubuntu 9.10 dual-booting on the Nokia Booklet 3G I was surprised at how responsive the system was. This may have had to do with the limiting power profile that ships with it in Windows. Bluetooth, WiFi, and 3G connectivity all worked right out of the box.
Graphics The GMA500 graphics and sound didn’t. Easy fix though, simply run this command:
wget http://gma500re.altervista.org/scripts/poulsbo.sh && sh ./poulsbo.sh
You’ll also need to be mindful of these instructions for future kernel updates. They’re really easy.
Just a simple reboot later and you’ll have full 1280×720 desktop glory.
Audio
Sound might not work right off the bat. My issue was interesting in that I would hear the catchy Ubuntu login sound, but no sounds after that. Here’s the simple result of my googling that fixed the problem.
Replace the line Option “AccelMethod” “EXA” with Option “AccelMethod” “UXA” in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Here’s a copy of my xorg.conf
Section "Device"
Identifier "GMA500"
Option "AccelMethod" "UXA"
Option "DRI" "on"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
Option "IgnoreACPI" "yes"
Driver "psb"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
HDMI Output
I futzed with System > Preferences > Display for way too long until I just went over to the trusty xrandr command. This command has saved my butt a few times on the show when trying to do a Linux demo. While I haven’t bothered integrating this into my xorg.conf as I’ll seldom use the HDMI output, it is invaluable when I need to do a demo with screen capturing and live to tape camera switching.
Here’s my hdmiout.sh script:
#!/bin/bash xrandr --newmode 1280x720R 63.75 1280 1328 1360 1440 720 723 728 741 +hsync -vsync xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1280x720R xrandr --output TMDS-1 --mode 1280x720R
Of course that’s assuming you’re outputting to a 720p display that’s happy with those refresh rates and what not. If you’re looking to output to something different I’ll point to this excellent resource.
Going forward
I’ll be putting this tough little machine to the test very shortly. I’m experimenting with HD video editing in Linux and have already successfully tested AVCHD editing and encoding. I’ll have another writeup on that adventure as I’m jumping in the deep end here shortly. I’ll be taking a trip to Toronto over the holidays and will need to produce, record, edit and deliver an episode of Hak5 while on the road. I intend to do it all on this machine, and our trusty Panasonic AG-HMC40. Wish me luck!
December 10th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
I noticed your new laptop in the latest episode of Hak5, and later on in the show, I heard your “sales pitch” for the machine. It looks pretty cool; I really like the slim factor. The only thing is that it seems to only be available at Best Buy. I really did not do too much looking into it however, so I may be wrong. I do have to say, I am quite impressed at the battery life. The only gripe I have against netbooks (I have an EeePc 701, actually running as a headless server, and an EeePc 1000 as my everyday, daily machine) is the lack of a dedicated GPU. Im sad to see this only has the integrated Intel graphics
December 10th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
@theSuperman I agree, after all this futzing I’m not the most fond of GMA500. It works, but I’d have rather had a step down GMA that was more widely supported.
Still, what I ultimately want is an nVidia ION netbook. That would be hot. Toss a few gigs of ram at it. Mmmm.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:15 am
My only misgivings about this and many other netbooks is the 10inch screens it’s just too small. To me 11-12inch screens are the ideal size. It looks like a great little machine though
December 11th, 2009 at 2:07 am
To me, 17″ in normal. I think the Netbook screen size is “too” small!
December 11th, 2009 at 4:05 am
The booklet seems pretty tempting, but while the hard drive is just a minor setback, I don’t think I could live with just 1GB ram and no way to upgrade it… I also wonder how does the HD actually work on it with so little resources? I remember my Asus EEE 901 with 2GB of RAM struggling to play a 720p video, so how about even less?
I have to say though, Nokia almost managed to make a perfect netbook!
December 13th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Been using 9.10 on my laptop for a few weeks now and I love it. Been thinking about getting a 3G booklet but I’m gonna wait and see if they come out with any different versions with maybe more ram
We shall see!
December 16th, 2009 at 8:35 am
He Darren!
What model of Acer are you using on the show? And I love that sleek little Nokia, might consider getting it. Are you forced to get an account with ATT?
December 16th, 2009 at 9:27 am
One thing I’ve been curious about regarding Linux on the booklet 3G is if the 3G network connectivity actually works (I have heard mixed experiences from other laptops, so I was curious if the booklet is any different). About the intel graphics chip…I kind of lucked-out when buying my netbook, because I didn’t think to check (I assumed intel was okay driver-wise), but luckily decided on a netbook with the 945GME, and have had few issues with it. You’re right though…ION in the booklet or an ION-powered netbook is something I’d really like to get
One last question. How is the keyboard on the netbook size-wise? They always give you the percentage size, but that doesn’t really mean much
Any out-of-the-ordinary key placements?
Anyways, I also wanted to mention that I’m quite the fan of Hak5, great show
Keep it up. I also quite like the blog (much more interesting than my own), I assume it’s running wordpress?
Regards,
Lucas
December 16th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Yes, the 3G on the Booklet works in Linux. At least it showed up in Ubuntu 9.10 right out of the box. It’s got a funky interface name but it’s listed in connection manager as “3G Wireless” or something like that.
The keyboard is one of the nicer of any netbook I’ve used. It doesn’t feel that cramped. This is likely due to the chicklet nature of the keys. It’s just like a modern macbook with the spacing between the keys.
The only odd placement is Fn. It’s to the left of CTRL in the very bottom left. I prefer it to the right of CTRL. This is a common placement however, and it doesn’t take me but a minute to mentally switch to this layout. If I was that bothered I’m sure I could remap it somehow.
PG UP, PG DOWN, HOME and END are mapped via Fn to the arrow keys. Takes a minute to get used to ‘em, especially when you’re trying to do combos like SHIFT + HOME. Still, not the end of the world. The important keys like ~ and | are there.
December 16th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Thanks for the info
About the keyboard: I quite like the one on my Samsung n110 as well. The only thing that throws me off some days is the fact that the pipe key (which is on the less than/greater than key on German layouts) is to the left of the right shift, instead of the right of the left shift.
Friend of mine had a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop with the Fn key next to ctrl, and it wasn’t too bad once you were able to do the mental swap, so it’s definitely not something I would complain about. And yeah, about remapping: you could easily use xbindkeys to swap the L_CTRL and modifier keys around (might be an easier way in Ubuntu these days).
Ah, yeah, my netbook has PG UP, PG Down, but HOME and END are mapped to those same keys with Fn…makes for some trouble when you miss the Fn key when using them. Glad to know the tilde and pipe keys are there. I found out the other day that the macbook keyboards (German layout at least), lack a clear pipe key, which makes terminal usage a little awkward.
Also, speaking of German, if you’re doing a segment on something and run into some German (it’s happened before
) you’d like translated by someone, feel free to hit me up with an email(lswest34@gmail.com). Least I can do for Hak5 
December 30th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Any Compiz goodness?
January 5th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Is there a technical reason for the RAM being attached to the main board that I’m unaware of? 1gig of RAM is way low IMO, especially if you want to install Windows 7 Ultimate and utilize the HDMI out with media center.
I really like the idea of built in 3G, but for now I’ll stick with my Acer Aspire One AO751H and my Verizon aircard.
A.
January 13th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Thanks for the info, I like Karmic on my 3g, eventhough it took me awhile (30 min) to figure out how to install it using thumb drive.
Windows7 is still doing upgrades and such after 24 hours and I got sick and tired of restarting it for the umpteenth time so I basically didn’t even play with it for more than 1/2 hour before deciding to go with linux.
Now if Nokia gets off their lazy butts and ports everything (ovi suite, pc suite and such) to Linux I’ll be a happy camper.
February 10th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
@Lucas Westermann , and how do you do that exactly?
Lucas Westermann Says:
” And yeah, about remapping: you could easily use xbindkeys to swap the L_CTRL and modifier keys around (might be an easier way in Ubuntu these days).”