beefy Dell Inspiron Mini 9
I got my hands on a Mini 9 from Dell running Ubuntu obviously. What a sweet, small and powerful machine that thing is. The demonstrated tech-demos use OpenGL, gstreamer, gtk+ and cairo on a purely OpenSource graphics stack (Xorg and Mesa). No proprietary binary driver-blobs involved. Here’s a little pimpage-video of its rendering power shown off bluntly:
(click to play back, ogv/theora, ~44 MBytes)
YouTube version of this video *shiver*
Please ignore my ad-hoc and superfluous comments I made during the recording. It would have been better with some mellow background music *g*.
All the models of the Mini 9 you can get from Dell come with a built-in webcam afaik. The version I got is an earlier developer device - I guess - which lacks the built-in webcam.
Update: I was informed that the Atom CPU of the Mini 9 uses hyper-threading and is not a real dual core CPU. Well you don’t see that distinction in gnome-system-monitor or via “cat /proc/cpuinfo”. Thanks for the heads up, folks!
October 20th, 2008 at 7:50 am
http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9 \
October 20th, 2008 at 7:51 am
my comment got cut off. The page you requested may no longer exist on Dell.com, cool stuff though.
October 20th, 2008 at 8:05 am
@ joolz: *sigh* I don’t know how to permamently link to their product page for the Mini 9 otherwise. Any ideas? "Big cheers" for dynamically created webpages/URLs
October 20th, 2008 at 9:12 am
No proprietary binary blobs, except for the demonstration apps?
(I kid, I kid…)
October 20th, 2008 at 9:41 am
@ Chris Lord: Dude!
You know where you can grab any of the shown tech-demo, I hope. If not I’ll list them here.
October 20th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Nice video, good to see you blogging again. Is there anything new in Ubuntu 8.10 using these techniques, like the new GDM display you blogged about earlier?
By the way, you can now embed the Ogg videos in your page, using HTML’s new VIDEO tag. It works well in Firefox 3.1, and maybe in Opera.
October 20th, 2008 at 11:14 am
wow the display is much too glossy for my taste - you could have alomost spared out the self filming part
And that is in a dark room - a EEE PC is much better in this regard…
October 20th, 2008 at 11:17 am
@appelflap, nearly no end user uses a browser with support for the VIDEO tag. Coole naam trouwens
I am also wondering about that face-browser.
October 20th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I just saw this on the german Dell website for the Mini 9, pure comedy gold: http://img136.imageshack.us/my.php?image=awesomeri9.jpg
October 20th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Hoeveel Nederlanders zitten hier wel niet? 0.o
Would love to finally see anything like this end up with normal users… Guess that won’t happen anytime soon
October 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Pity about the sucky launcher. Thats not Clutter is it ?
October 20th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
@ appelflap: Well browsers like ff 3.1 will take a bit before they hit the broad public. Once that happens I gladly do posts which use the new video-element.
@ Pavel: There’s hardly anything you can do these days about the glossy screens. Every device of that kind comes with it. I never understood why everybody thinks laptops/netbooks will constantly be "on display in some store-window". That’s the only moment such glossy screens look nice. Once you use them the reflections are nothing but annoying.
@ spoa: Takes more time.
@ georg: Bitter isn’t it.
@ mallum: The launcher is using clutter.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Very cool!
October 20th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Wow, nice demos! Just a note: the ogg extension is deprecated for videos, you should now use ogv for them (http://wiki.xiph.org/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions)
PS: Your captcha is very hard!
October 20th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Oh, I don\\\\\\\’t think it is bitter at all. I rather find it amusing that Microsoft praises Ubuntu as the best operating system for the Mini
October 20th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
@ Robin: Let’s see how well that works for people.
@ georg: I totally don’t like seeing that MS add at this very spot.
October 20th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Hate to break it to you, but the n270 atom CPU in the mini is NOT dual core.
Gotta wait for the n300 series before we see dual core atoms.
October 20th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Echoing what someone earlier said, nice to see another of your blog spots, I always find then very interesting.
1 Question:
What did happen to the OpenGL GDM Face Browser thing?
October 20th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Actually the base option (at least on the US Dell site) is for no webcam a 0.3 Mbyte one is a $10 option and a 1.3 Mbyte camera an additional $25.
October 20th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Hey dude, the Dell isn’t multi-core, but has hyper-threading enabled so it shows up as two separate processors in gnome-system-monitor.
October 20th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
hey Mirco. Nice to see you blogging again, especially now that I’m seriously attracted to the Mini 9. I’m considering getting one if this thinkpad finally dies. It’s somewhat cheaper to grab a Mini 9 than to keep maintaining a T43 in the long run, it seems (and with this netbook, you get the LED screen and SSD and passive cooling; pretty compelling). I’m surprised to see that this can even play HD video.
I was wondering though, I know that the current generation of Mini 9 uses the i945 chipset or something along those lines. I’m pretty sure that within a year or so, they will switch to a Poulsbo motherboard chipset instead of i945, to get lower power consumption (poulsbo seems to be the thing that will go hand in hand with Atom processors). Do you have an idea how performance would be after that? Think that the poulsbo GPU would be better than an i915/i945? Do you have an idea if the future dell inspiron mini 9’s, if they use the poulsbo chipset, would be instantly supported by linux/xorg? (just asking out of random, I know you’re not the OEM, etc
P.s.: your captcha is nuts. Maybe you could consider ReCaptcha?
October 20th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
@ Corey/Neil J. Patel: Ok, I got it … will add an errata to the blog-post.
@ Andrew: It’s still consuming some of my brain-power
@ Alastair: Oh, I thought they all come with a built-in webcam these days.
@ jeff: Looking up on Poulsbo indicates that some Img. Tech. PowerVR SGX GPU is part of it. That would be very cool as it is suppose to be a full (fragment, vertex, geometry) OpenGL|ES 2.0 shader GPU. Only question remains, what’s their stated Linux support like. I still remember the issue with no OpenSource driver for their earlier architecture - the MBX - which was used in the N770/N800 and due to the lack of free drivers was not used at all. That would suck on an epic scale!
October 20th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
He’s back =)
October 20th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
You’ve totally sold me on buying one of these. (Darn you.) Those are some pretty sweet demos - it’s great that a low-power chipset doesn’t mean a poor user experience. Thanks for the demo!
October 21st, 2008 at 2:57 am
What is that launcher bar that Dell preinstalls? Is it open source? Are there repos and a deb? It looks cool.
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Yeah… what launcher is that??? Seems very cool. The white panel from where you launch the apps and the bar on top of it.
Could you guide us about it? Have been trying to get at it, but didn’t find anything.
Thanks!
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
@ Derek, Cobo: It’s a Dell specific addition to Ubuntu afaik. Your best bet is to contact them about it.
October 23rd, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Thanks for replying and thanks for all the cool things you show us… Glad you blogged again.
Cheers!