Fedora on Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite 905S3G K01

My current netbook is a Lenovo x121e. It served me well for the last years, but it felt like the time has come to retire it.

The main decision points for a new netbook are the CPU (must be AMD), low power usage, the form factor (14" or below). All of this is showing, that I am not looking for a power horse, but a nice a silent machine for idling, travels and occasional idea drafting.

The current netbook I used was a Lenovo x121e, a AMD E-350 (or 450?) based netbook. It performed well in the scenarios where I used it.

After a good amount of research - where I found out that there don’t seem to be many netbooks which meet my requirements - I finally settled with a Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite.

image

It has a slightly modified quad-core AMD A-1450 APU (which is Jaguar based), an 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM. The CPU might be a bit underpowered with 1GHz and the RAM could also have been a bit larger. But the first impressions are that the specs are enough to run Fedora 20 with GNOME 3 without (m)any hassles.

Some hints:

  • BIOS: You can reach it by pressing F2 when the Samsung splash appears
  • SecureBoot: Initially worked, now doesn’t. Needs to be investigated.

The important stuff works out of the box: Wifi, suspend to RAM, and all the other hardware.

Let’s see how it behaves in the daily life.

Pros:

  • Fedora 20 runs fine
  • AMD A-1450 (Jaguar microarchitecture based APU)
  • Low-Power usage
  • Nice case and keyboard
  • Good hardware support (suspend, audio, wifi)
  • Very silent (nearly fanless)

Cons:

  • Power connector is badly designed
  • Built-in battery
  • Suboptimal display

P.s.: In general it seems to compare well to a “Chromebook”.

::: {#footer} [ April 30th, 2014 9:40pm ]{#timestamp} [fedora]{.tag} [samsung]{.tag} [ativ]{.tag} [netbook]{.tag} [opencl]{.tag} [gnome]{.tag} :::