If you own a Dell Inspiron Mini with Ubuntu and paid extra to upgrade your hard drive from the stock 4 GB to an 8 GB or 16 GB SSD drive, you better get sudo fdisk-ing and check your partition sizes. A savvy Inspiron Mini owner noticed his 16 GB SSD was only showing up as a 4 GB inside Ubuntu. A quick check of the bios revealed that the physical drive was indeed 16 GB leaving him to wonder what happened to that extra 12 GB. He was not the only one to notice this discrepancy and bring it to the attention of Dell. It did not take Dell very long to admit there was an error in their manufacturing process. Turns out their technicians were using a disk image for a 4 GB install on each and every one of their Ubuntu machines. In other words, all 8 GB and 16 GB machines were partitioned as 4 GB machines. Oops! As of Friday, Dell announced that each and every new Ubuntu system will be installed with the correct partition size. Yay! Dell has kindly offered a solution to the problem if you are one of the unlucky early adopters: use your system restore disk to repartition your disk and re-install Ubuntu. If you are a Linux junkie, then you can attempt to resize your partition with gParted and skip the whole re-installation hassle process. Whichever method you choose be sure to backup your data first, ok? Wouldn’t want anyone to lose the one and only picture of dear Aunt Ethel at her 100th birthday celebration in the backyard of her beautiful Victorian house on the day before it was unexpectedly destroyed by a hurricane. Priceless.

[via Liliputing]

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The Dell mini notebook that we first laid eyes on back in May looks to be all set to become official this week. Geared towards web surfing and light usage, Dell’s Inspiron 910 could be quite an entry into the mini notebook space. While specs have yet to become official, there is a good deal being reported at this point and everything is looking pretty on point. Apparently the sub-10 inch notebook will weigh in around 2.2 pounds and will sport an 8.9 inch screen and three USB 2.0 ports. The guts will include a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, up to 1 GB of RAM, integrated WiFi and a built-in camera. It also looks like the Inspiron 910 will sport SSD for storage and will vary in size up to 16 GB. Of course 16 GB isn’t going to get you very far these days even in a netbook, so rumor has it that Dell has worked out a deal with online storage leader Box.net to include a cloud storage solution out of the box. Stuff all that into a portable that is said to start under $400 and you may very well have a winner on your hands – even in candy apple red (don’t worry, it’ll be available in black as well).

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