My Wife is a teacher and wanted "one of these small PC thingies" to
carry around all day.

So I bought her a Dell Inspiron Duo, because she also wants "one of
those touch pad thingies" ;-)

Since all of our household PCs run OpenSuse the Netbook had to have it
too. I was tempted to go for a more touch friendly Linux distro like
Meego but decided against it. The differences would have been to
confusing for the user. Btw. I will try to get a refund or at least
store credit for the unused/unwanted Windows that came with the Netbook.
I will Post here how that goes.

The Inspiron Duo has no DVD Drive so I installed using an external USB
Drive (had no 4GB+ Stick). The installation went without fuzz ( Follow
Instructions on: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick ):

• Download the install ISO

• Patch the iso for USB Booting:

  # zypper in syslinux# isohybrid openSUSE-11.4-DVD-x86_64.iso
  

• Copy the ISO to the drive

  # sudo zypper in ddrescue# sudo umount /dev/sdXY# dd_rescue openSUSE-11.4-KDE-LiveCD-x86_64.iso /dev/sdXY
  

• Boot from the USB drive

• Install

• The Touch screen -> Works after installing Drivers
• The Microphone (Speakers work) -> Works after setting Sound Module
  Options
• The KDE Networkmanager -> Works after upgrading KDE  (WLAN itself
  work out of the Box)

KDE Networkmanager

This is actually not related to the Inspiron DUO. But since the DUO has
WLAN only I had to have it fixed.

The KDE Networkmanager that comes with OpenSuse 11.4 (+Updates) seems to
broken for some Intel WLAN Cards. I have the same problem with Dell
E6500. The Networkmanager will simply drop connections with WPA2 after a
few Minutes/Seconds. For no good reason.

My fix: Upgrade to KDE 4.7 (see
http://en.opensuse.org/KDE_repositories  )

sudo zypper ar --check --refresh http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/47/openSUSE_11.4/ KDE47-Coresudo zypper ar --check --refresh http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/KDE_Release_47_openSUSE_11.4/ KDE47-Extrasudo zypper dup

Goodies

I installed Chrome as the default Browser. It simply behaves better that
Firefox on low Power Devices.
The chromeTouch Extension enables Touch Pad like scrolling.

I use Kvkbd as an on Screen (touch) keyboard

From the OpenSuse Education Projects
( http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Education ) I installed:

• Childsplay ( http://www.schoolsplay.org
   / http://en.opensuse.org/Childsplay ) and
• tuxpaint ( http://tuxpaint.org )
• gcompris ( http://gcompris.net/-en- )

I wrote this one for [Novell Cool Solutions][]: **Problem:** USB HDDS are not automounted when no GNOME or KDE session is active in SLES/SLED **Solution:** Seen working in: SUSE 10.1, SLES 10, SLED 10 OpenSuse 10.3 (see Update at end of Article) This article describes how to ...

Scott Morris of suseblog.com found something i had completely
forgotten about:

Kernel based SysRq which allows you to kill processes, sync/remount
disks and even reboot your box when it becomes unresponsive.

Scott's Article
Wikipedia Entry

My Company gave me a Dell D820 Laptop Movable Desktop
(\~5Kg!!?). It came with XP which of course was wiped instantly. I am
running SLED 10 SP1 for a while but wanted to try all the 10.3 goodness
on it:

Dell D820

• CPU: Intel® Core ...