I broke down and got a refurbished Dell Mini 9. It arrived last week and I’ve been quite happy with it. It came with XP installed but I was able to easily install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (based on 8.04 LTS) and then got 8.10 installed with the same look-and-feel. The comments I got before purchasing it was that it’s pretty hacker-friendly so I can upgrade it later if I like, but that the keyboard sucks eggs. The keyboard part is right, it’s worse if you expect to do a lot at the shell as keys like ~, |, all the function keys, and {}[] all require you use a modifier to get them. I’m a touch typist, so my hands have been conditioned by 25 years of typing on regular-sized keyboards, so I type a lot slower on this kind of a keyboard.
All that being said, it’s quite impressive. My wife took to it instantly and we’re fighting over who gets to use it. I may even convince her to give up the Powerbook in favor of something much smaller and with better battery life. I guess time will tell on this.
On the plus side, it does pretty much everything I want. The USB ports can charge multiple devices, the bluetooth and wifi let me connect from anywhere, and while I couldn’t get my D40 to connect to 8.04, I have a bit of hope for 8.10. In any event, I can always just slap the SDHC card in and get to my photos that way.
I was able to get some photos of the mini 9 compared to the EEE, my X61, and a MacBook Pro. The MacBooks really look like monsters now.