[vox] Dell Mini 9 back for just a bit at 240 bucks

[Brian Lavender]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:13:05AM -0700, Brian Lavender wrote:
> I don't know about you guys, but the Dell Mini 9 just plain rocks. It is
> about to go into the abyss of has beens though. I am not sure why. Maybe
> it's because the modders figured out how to put Mac OSX on it and Dell
> just didn't want to fight a $240 hackintosh. 
> 
> http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/07/23/dell-mini-9-slight-return.aspx
> 
> I ordered a second one. 
> 
> http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dncoxm1&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&kc=laptop-inspiron-9

Just got my second one with the 4 Gig SSD and it didn't upgrade so well.
The number of updated packages in Dell's repository uses all space and
the machine grinds to a halt (not a problem if you have an 8 Gig SSD or
higher). I ended putting in an SD card in the slot, creating
a loop back file on it and then linking /var/cache/apt to it in order
to apply all the updates. Once it was done, everything ran well: Windows
codecs, flash, etc.

Apparently, Canonical is aware of the problem.

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/dell-mini/+bug/380784

Here are the commands in case anyone else ran out and got the one with
the 4 Gig SSD

pushd /media/disk

dd if=/dev/zero of=./swap bs=1M count=500
dd if=/dev/zero of=./space bs=1M count=1000
mkswap ./swap
swapon ./swap
losetup -f ./space
# change this to sfdisk
cfdisk /dev/loop0

mkfs.ext2 /dev/loop0
mkdir /mnt/loop
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/loop/
pushd /var/cache/

tar cvf - apt | ( cd /mnt/loop && tar xfp - )
mv apt apt.orig
ln -s /mnt/loop/apt
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
# restore the original /var/cache

rm -rf * # remove the original contents of the apt.orig cache
pushd /mnt/loop/

tar cvf - apt | ( cd /var/cache && tar xfp - ) # restore apt cache to its original spot
popd # back in /var/cache

rm -rf apt.orig
popd # back in /media/disk

umount /mnt/loop
rm ./space
swapoff ./swap
rm ./swap







-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/