Cheap netbook

[Nex0]

I'm in need of a netbook with good battery life.
I will only be surfing the web on it and coding, so the specs don't need to be great.
I will be running linux on it.

Have any of you got any suggestions?

[bad_brain]

hm, the Asus eee PC series is known to run out of the box with Ubuntu, many other netbooks are tricky to set up when it comes to the networking connectivity, sometimes it's even simply not working at all under Linux.

with a little luck you can find an older model of the 900 series (which is enough for your needs) for under 200 Euro... battery runtime they say is between 4 and 7 hours under Windows, if you use a slim windows manager under Linux, like icewm for example, it should increase remarkable.

[Nex0]

hm, the Asus eee PC series is known to run out of the box with Ubuntu, many other netbooks are tricky to set up when it comes to the networking connectivity, sometimes it's even simply not working at all under Linux.

with a little luck you can find an older model of the 900 series (which is enough for your needs) for under 200 Euro... battery runtime they say is between 4 and 7 hours under Windows, if you use a slim windows manager under Linux, like icewm for example, it should increase remarkable.

Thank you.

So are you suggesting not to work under linux because of networking connnectivity? Does this outweigh the benefits such as battery life and overall efficiency?

Looks like i'll be doing some price comparisons.

[bad_brain]

well, I am not saying Linux on netbooks is generally a problem, but on mobile computers it's often more tricky to make it work. the most problems are caused by WLAN devices and touchpads. so best look around for some candidates and then come back so we can check for Linux compatibility....

if installing Linux on a netbook makes sense in context with the battery runtime also depends on the netbook and the Linux distro again, I have read a couple of tests in Linux mags already, and the power saving features of some netbooks (like suspend to RAM, decreasing CPU clocking when idling, etc.) don't work well together with Linux....on such a netbook Windows would provide a longer runtime.

[lilrofl]

I have a netbook EEEPC 1000, and it works great with Mandriva and Ubuntu, I've also had luck with Fedora 13 after some fiddling of the WiFi drivers, same with Arch... runs great after some WiFi configuring. Battery life varies but is somewhere between 6 and 12 hours, depending on what you are doing... watching movies or surfing the web for example.