Samsung N140 Netbook - Fedora 12 Install

This is a bit of a review / Howto on installing Fedora 12 on a Samsung N140 Netbook.

Received the netbook yesterday (5th December) from Amazon. Netbook N140 with Windows Started 7.

Powered it up, took about 2 hours for the entire Samsung bloatware to finish installing and give me a login to Windows 7. I had never used Windows 7 previously, so was a bit stumped at how basic it looked and felt and sure enough googling around made it clear that Windows 7 Starter is one majorly constrained OS. It doesn't even let you change the desktop background, plus several annoying things. In hindsight, I should have saved £30 and ordered the XP version..sigh..Because I felt a bit cheated, I vouched that I will not pay the $78 to do the upgrade to Home Premium etc which will let me customize.

So without wasting too much time, I decided to install Fedora 12.

Here are the steps I did..

The netbook doesn't have an Optical drive and hence I used a 1GB USB stick to get the process started. I downloaded the Fedora Live-USB creator for windows from https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ and went about downloading the image to the USB stick. Took about 30 minutes to complete.

Then I powered up the netbook, went to BIOS by pressing F2 at startup, went to the section on BOOT Order and selected USB Key as the first boot device.

Plugged in the USB stick with Fedora LIVE and booted the machine.

Once the LIVE system logs you in, there is a shortcut on the Desktop for installing to hard disk. Double Clicked that and just followed the prompts. I didn't want to loose the Windows 7 (just in case) and hence installed this on a second partition. Took about 15 - 20 minutes for the OS to install.

Pretty much most of it worked right after install. Suspend, resume, speakers, mouse, edge scrolling, ethernet network etc all came up fine. Only missing element was the wireless.

The N140 netbook comes with a REALTEK RTL8192 chipset.So figured that ndiswrapper would be a requirement as I couldn't find much info from googling around.

First I did a "yum -y update" to get the new kernels and other bits and pieces. Once done, I rebooted for the new 2.6.31.6-145 kernel to take effect.

Then I basically followed the instructions as per www.fedoramobile.org/wireless.

For the lazy ppl out there, here is the copy of my history

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm
yum install kmod-ndiswrapper
mkdir /ndiswrapper_drivers
cd /ndiswrapper_drivers/

Then I went to http://www.samsung.com/uk/support/download/supportDown.do?group=&type=notebookcomputers&subtype=rseries&model_nm=NP-R620Edisp_nm=R620&language=&cate_type=all&dType=D&mType=DR&vType=&prd_ia_cd=05010400&model_cd=&menu=download

and downloaded the XP version of the drivers. Please note that the VISTA and Windows7 drivers for the RTL8192 chipset didn't work for me.

Copy the net819xp.cat net819xp.inf rtl819xp.sys files to the /ndiswrapper_drivers folder

Then install the driver
ndiswrapper -i net819xp.inf
ndiswrapper -l (to check if the chipset has been detected)
modprobe ndiswrapper
dmesg|grep wlan0 ( to check if all is OK)

If all is swell, then
ndiswrapper -ma
echo "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" >> /etc/modprobe.conf


Thats about it. Wireless connected up fine, came up asking me for the WPA key. I rebooted to make sure it kicked back in and all came up nicely. no Fuss.

I am still using teh basic 1GB RAM..haven't upgraded it. It did seem a bit slugging under Windows 7 and under Fedora 12, am still thinking about doing it, but after disabling some unnecessary services under Fedora 12, I think I'm a happy bunny. I'm even using the AERO display features under Fedora and everything is smooth. Application switching is fast and launching speeds are good. Can't complain. Obviously adding more RAM would help without a doubt, but may be in a few months time when I have some cash to spare as it doesn't seem like a urgent requirement. No sluggishness what so ever.

Over pretty happy with the netbook. Battery life does seem to be awesome. I've been using this flat out from about 6 hours now and it still says 2 hours remaining. I'm not sure it'll have the advertised 10 hour battery life, but 8 or 9 hours is good enough for me ;-)

Hope this is useful for someone. Leave a comment if you have a moment to spare..

cheers