Here's the story: I bought this netbook for my mom. Figuring that it would be a great little laptop for her to kick around the house with, easy to use, decent battery life, perfect for what she needs it for: internet, email, pictures. It worked OK for what she needed it for. There were a couple of problems.
1) Processor/General Performance: With the default ubuntu 8.04 installed, the performance was pathetic. Period.
2.) The SSD went bad. Yeah, I knowwhat are the odds of that right? The good part was that Dell sent me a new one. The bad partwas I had to talk to Dell for 45 minutes...

While she was waiting for her netbook to get fixed, i loaned her one of my other laptops. 1.4Ghz 15" screen, 1GB RAM. Needless to say, she wants to keep that one. So... here I am with a Dell mini 9....

The first thing I did after installing the new SSD was to replace the OS. I chose Moblin (see my other post regarding the wireless config). Moblin was nice, fairly snappy, quick to load, quick to shut down. But I didn't really like the UI all that much. It was confusing to me. Plus, without Facebook integration the idea that you can call it an OS designed for social networking is sort of laughable.

Next up: Ubuntu Netbook Remix UNR (9.04)
This one was good. In fact I'm typing this post from it! However, there was one glitch. Apparently if you switch from the default UNR desktop to the classic desktop it throws out some sort of error. What you are left with is a blank desktop. With no icons. Even after a restart the blank desktop returns. Here is how to fix it:

1.) Right click on the screen
2.) Create a new launcher
3.) for the name and the command type: xterm
4.) click OK
This will create a desktop icon which will give you access to the xterm terminal.
5.) Launch the icon and type desktop-switcher
6.) Select the UNR desktop. This will take you back to the standard launcher type setup.
From here. open a terminal and type the following:
gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components_list --type list --list-type=string ["windowmanager","panel"]
7.) Download this file: here
8.) Double click the file
9.) restart your computer
10.) ENJOY Ubuntu Netbook Remix!!

Besides that "minor" bug, its a great netbook OS.

Just a short rant here on linux: Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan. The more I use it the more I like it. Mainly Ubuntu. Both the server and the desktop version, are for me, very good and very straightforward. The server version more so than the desktop though.

The one thing that I can't figure out is why it's so damn hard to get wireless running on the desktop versions. I know that in some cases it just works right out of the gate, but for me no matter what laptop I install Ubuntu (any version really) the wi-fi is an epic PITA! I dont' see how linux will ever be adopted on a large scale if this isn't rectified. Most people are not going to want to apt-get a bunch of stuff, or wget + rpmbuilt, etc, etc. It's just too much work.

Either way, linux is drastically better now compared to a few years ago, so maybe a few years from now this will be a non-issue, but right now: it's frustrating.

Luckily there are many many people much smarter and more experienced with linux than I am, so when you do have a problem there is usually a solution already in place. The hard part is finding it!

Here's the short version of how to setup wireless on a dell mini 9 running the newest version of Moblin (v2).

This information was gleened from: http://slaine.org/_slaine/Dell_Mini_9.html

1) Activate the moblin toolbar and select the applications icon
2) Choose the Accessories section and select Terminal
3) Install the various tools you’ll need : sudo yum install rpmdevtools
4)Install the compilers and other tools: sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
5)Install the kernel-netbook-devel package: sudo yum install kernel-netbook-devel
6)Now we’re ready to build and install the new broadcom drivers: wget
 http://slaine.org/files/moblinv2/wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.src.rpm
    rpmbuild --rebuild --target=i586 wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.src.rpm
7)Install the resulting rpm:
sudo rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i586/wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.i586.rpm

For me, this worked 100% the first time. Just be sure you do all of the steps in the order presented and you should be fine. For safe measure i did a sudo reboot after the proceedure and VIOLA! The wireless adapter showed up.