Jape, ChinaV,

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions. Maybe we should move this to off-topic, but this topic of how to upfit a netbook is definitely appropriate for this forum. Why? Given the risks of weather, trauma, theft, spilled noodles, puke flying from buses, etc, I've wanted to develop a cheap "road laptop" that I could use for 1) email, 2) skype, 3) web browsing and 4) picture and video editing on the fly. I'd prefer not to carry my Macbook, as that is my main working machine and it would be catastrophic to me if it got puked on or stolen or crumpled.

So can we create a new thread called Roadworthy Laptops?

The Samsung was a gift from a Chinese company at their share-listing party, and it's loaded with WinXP in Chinese. Gag me with a hard disk. For an OSX user, if there is nothing uglier and recoil-inducing than WinXP, it's WinXP in Chinese. (I have XP loaded on my Mac in the Bootcamp partition, but I don't think I've ever fired it up.)

Conventional thinking would be to install WinXP in English over the Chinese version, and suffer with XP. Not for me, thanks. I want nothing to do with Windows ever again, even though, as Jape has noted, it's apparently finally gotten to be a tolerably good operating system. A year ago, when I got this little netbook, I was attracted to Moblin as it had a reputation for support (which seemed to have had an easy interface and some commercial backing), but now I read it's been superceded by something called MeeGo, whatever that is. There must be 100 choices of distro out there, which is 99 too many for me. I'm not that dedicated to this project. I'm not ruling out some Linux flavor, but it seems there's still a lot of churn and partisanship out there. I'm not a technie, and I want an easy path.

Now OSX -- that's an interesting idea and one that had not occurred to me. So I'll perhaps spend an hour or two this afternoon at least reading up on the idea, starting with that link you forwarded, and see if I can find anyone who's done it on the N128.

Thanks!