What is a good cheap new netbook to get?

[davidfrost]

Basically I have an HP laptop and I can't get the audio drivers to work no matter what distro I use. Puredyne is my all time favorite distro by a long shot, but none of the drivers work on that. I use a the Oracle Virtual Box as a virtual machine and have both Puredyne and Mint 9 Isadora on that, they both work perfect on that. The problem I always have is that I don't want to have a window open with linux on it, I want a fully functional Linux OS as my main OS. Like I said...I tried to make it a dual boot and could never get the audio drivers to work. I always wanted a netbook, I like to travel a lot, I need to keep Windows on my laptop for work, so I think now is a good time. The only problem is I can't afford anything higher than $250. Is there anyone with experience with netbooks AND the Puredyne distro that could give me some advice?

[spm_gl]

If the HP works well otherwise, wouldn't it make more sense to get an external audio interface instead of a netbook? I have an acer aspire one 150, but it doesn't work too well for audio. The internal sound cards of these things suck anyway.

[davidfrost]

Linux Mint 9 Isadora works perfect with the exception of there being no sound, but that isn't me favorite. I want to get Puredyne to work but every time I try to install it as a dual boot, I just end up with a black blank screen. I tried to get my Lexicon Alpha interface to work when I had Mint 9 as a dual boot, because I thought that was a way to work around the driver issue, but couldn't get that to work. I don't know why, I've read that the Lexicon Alpha works great in Linux from what every other person is saying. I might try my old Line 6 toneport guitar,bass, & vocals processor interface/MIDI Keyboard but it is large and bulky and I really don't want to use it for travel.

[davidfrost]

Oh and another thing if you want to talk to software developers about ideas for apps and distros, where do you post that stuff? I have e-mailed a couple people and posted ideas in a couple places I still don't feel like I am handling it in an effective manner.

[autostatic]

Oh and another thing if you want to talk to software developers about ideas for apps and distros, where do you post that stuff? I have e-mailed a couple people and posted ideas in a couple places I still don't feel like I am handling it in an effective manner.

Developers mailing lists. Or bugtrackers that allow for feature requests. Developers hardly check any forums.

[autostatic]

Basically I have an HP laptop and I can't get the audio drivers to work no matter what distro I use.

What type of HP laptop? I have a HP laptop too and no real issues with the onboard soundcard.

[davidfrost]

I have a HP G62-144DX Notebook PC.

[defenestratos]

Ben Q are doing some interesting stuff.
I type this on the U102 LIte from BenQ

[davidfrost]

I took a look at the Benq netbook...it looks awesome and right up my alley, but I can't find out how to get one in the USA

[autostatic]

I have a HP G62-144DX Notebook PC.

And what distro are you using? What does aplay -l in a terminal return?

[davidfrost]

I use Pure:dyne, that is my all time favorite!

Here is the link...

http://puredyne.org/

[autostatic]

Is that based on Ubuntu 9.10? If so then you should be able to install the ALSA backports package for Karmic, maybe that helps. But what does aplay -l in a terminal return?

[davidfrost]

I keep trying to type that into the terminal and I get the message "command not found."

I'm not sure which ubuntu version it is bases on but the best I could find is in this wiki entry...

"It was initially based on the dyne:bolic multimedia linux distribution, and focused mostly on Pure Data, hence the name. The later "leek and potato" release in January 2009 marked a transition to Debian[4], and the January 2010 release was primarily Ubuntu-based but with Debian tools.[5]"

[autostatic]

It's based on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala): http://download.goto10.org/puredyne/car ... 6.packages
And the aplay utility is part of the alsa-utils package which is installed by default on puredyne so it shouldn't return 'command not found'. And I also see now that puredyne has a linux-rt kernel for which there is no ALSA backports package availabe. But cat /proc/asound/cards returns the same information as aplay -l, could you try that one?

[davidfrost]

this is what it says in my terminal below....

zsh: no such file or directory: cat /proc/asound/cards
zsh: exit 127 cat /proc/asound/cards