I recently picked up an MSI Wind U123, and have been doing my usual try-every-operating-system-I-can-find-and-see-what-happens tests. Along the way, I’ve tried Windows XP (was installed by MSI, lasted a few minutes before I got rid of it), Windows 7 (worked fine out-of-box, no extra drivers needed), Moblin v2 (not a big fan of the UI, but ran very well from an 8GB SDHC card), Fedora 12 (big issues with this one, but it’s only an Alpha release), and now I’m at Fedora 11.
I dumped the Live image of Fedora 11 (Gnome desktop manager) on to my SD card (the U123 supports booting from SD cards, something my old Acer AspireONE couldn’t do), and installed it in less than 10 minutes, boot times included. Almost everything works out-of-box, however the Gnome UI was horrifically huge. Most windows would fill the screen and beyond, making it impossible to see buttons, let alone click them.
The solution? Change the default DPI. To do this, login, then click the System menu, followed by Preferences and Appearance. In the resulting window, click the Fonts tab, then the Details button at the bottom. In the new window, change Resolution to 96 and hit Enter on your keyboard (as the Close button is just out-of-view). Everything should be back to normal.
In addition to this, I also changed all of the font sizes to 8, but that isn’t strictly necessary – I just like to get as much on the screen as I can.
Beyond that, everything else works perfectly, including sound, wireless, the SD card reader, and even the webcam.
Update (Dec 12, 2010): The Wind U123 works perfectly on Fedora 14 with no additional hacks/changes needed.
