Lenovo IdeaPad S10

Linux Compatibility:

After wiping Windows XP SP3 from the hard disk we proceeded to install Ubuntu 8.10. With Ubuntu 8.10 and the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, everything had appeared to work "out of the box" without any additional configurations. The Broadcom WiFi was working, the integrated web camera had no problems, the audio worked, etc. This is certainly nice to see and makes it an easy process for those looking to rid Microsoft software from their hard drive.

Linux Performance:

With Ubuntu 8.10 we compared the performance of the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 to our Samsung NC10 netbook. The Samsung netbook was equipped with an Intel Atom N270 CPU, Intel 945GME Chipset, 1024 x 600 display, and other similar hardware, until it came to the hard disk and system memory. In our NC10 we had installed a 32GB OCZ Core Series V2 SSD and 2GB of DDR2 memory (in contrast to the IdeaPad S10 with 512MB of DDR2 and an 80GB HDD). Ubuntu 8.10 was left in its stock configuration with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, GNOME 2.24.1, X Server 1.5.2, xf86-video-intel 2.4.1, Mesa 7.2, GCC 4.3.2, and the EXT3 file-system.

Using the Phoronix Test Suite we had run a horde of Linux benchmarks on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 and Samsung NC10. The tests used included LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, timed ImageMagick compilation, Gzip compression, IOzone, Tandem XML, SQLite, OpenSSL, GnuPG, RAMspeed, Sunflow Rendering System, Bork File Encrypter, Java SciMark, QGears2, and GtkPerf.