Nokia Booklet and Linux

Nokia Booklet is actually a stylish piece of hardware, when most so called netbooks look like plastic toys. Aluminum outer shell has a pleasing design, which makes it look very professional. Esthetically it is in same league as new Mac notebooks. Good thing in Booklet is its batteries. You can easily work on batteries alone for 8 hours, even 12 hours, depending on usage. And it has in-built 3G module, which means no usb-sticks or dongles.

When Booklet was released it was quite Linux-unfriendly. Nokia seem to have the habit of selecting hardware, that gives lots of headache to open source developers. But now these problems have diminished to minor nuisance. Everything does not work perfectly out of the box, but with some extra work you can overcome the problems.

Current Ubuntu 10.04 and 9.10 should detect and configure all hardware on Booklet. Even 3G works out of the box. Only exception to this rule is video resolution. Booklet has GMA500 video hardware, and without external drivers you are stuck on 800×600 resolution. But this can be solved using drivers from this site

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo

It has detailed instructions depending on Ubuntu versions you are using. It seems that currently best hardware support is for Ubuntu 9.10. In 10.04 some features do not have “excellent” status, but this will change, quite certainly.