Install Kubuntu 11.04 on Samsung N150

I had a Samsung N150 from the office and installed it with Kubuntu 11.04 not long ago. Below are some notes to get it working acceptably. It's more of a high level notes/todos on setting things up for guides and reminder and not meant for the detailed to-the-letter instructions (read : familiarity with ubuntu/linux is assumed).

• The basic installation. There is nothing special here as it went quite straightforward.
• Changing the network-manager with wicd. My wifi can not be connected with the defallt-installed network-manager. Removing network-manager and replacing it with wicd (together with it's kde integration) solve the problem.
• Add xorg-edgers to apt-source and do updates to get video driver hardware acceleration (http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu natty main). This way, the 3d efffects on kde will run smoothly.
• Fix the brightness setting : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/574250. Installing samsung-backlight and samsung-tools mentioned on the article does not help in my case (only working once after install and the brightness setting fail to work again after resboot).  The solution I end up settling in is making script to encapsulate the solution using setpci as referred on the article. It is not user friendly but good enough for me and since I don't change brightness too often it i not really a big deal.

Despite it needs some research and tweak to get it working to a usable state, it is interesting to use when it is finally working. The kubuntu netbook-style desktop need sometime to get used to but after it I can appreciate how it makes the work on the netbook and and it's utilization become more efficient, most notably the screen real estate.  It does that without compromising the usability too much. Also, having the application menu integrated to desktop in a popup/vertical way is very cool too.