[Charlug] Oops. Sorry Bill Gates........

[Dennis Clark]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Tim Jowers <timjowers at gmail.com> wrote:

> How do you like the netbook? Does it play a video acceptably? I wonder
> how it compares to OLPC.
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Bob Evans <bobevans19 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I knew I shouldn't have bought that Linux netbook at Target..........
> >
> >
> >
> http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsoft_layoffs_netbooks_sales_are_killi=
ng_us
>

I was tempted to buy the Target Eee PC when it came out in the holiday
season but I held off since I had just bought some other gadgets. However
when Newegg was selling the EeePC 1000 for $400 this month I could no longer
resist so I bought one.

A comparison of the specifications of the models in the Eee PC family is at
http://event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/eeepc_comparison.htm. The model sold
at Target stores is a 900 series, but I can't tell exactly which model. I
picked the 1000 model because of the slightly larger size (both screen and
keyboard) and the addition of wireless N and Bluetooth. Like many of the
earlier Eee PCs, the 1000 uses Solid State for persistant storage, but much
more of it ... one 8GB SSD and one 32GB SSD for a total of 40GB.

I haven't spent a lot of time on my Eee PC 1000 yet, but I'm very happy with
the hardware so far. It boots quickly, the screen is a decent size and I can
type comfortably on the keyboard. Connecting to wireless is easy enough; I
haven't played with its Bluetooth connectivity yet.

The touchpad buttons don't feel quite right, and I am having to teach myself
to tap the touchpad instead of left-clicking. I'm not too concerned about
the touchpad because I actually don't mind command-line and curses
interfaces. In fact I may start using my Eee PC to play NetHack again!
However I did find a Bluetooth mouse on sale and decided to buy it just to
be on the safe side: I should receive it within the next week.

Up until now my only attempt at video playback was playing a Flash SWF
through the the Eee Storage service (which uses FUSE to create a local
mount). The SWF playback was painful, but that could just as well be due to
the performance of Eee Storage. On the other hand, the video feedback from
the builtin 1.3 megapixel webcam was quite smooth (I believe it was at
15fps).

The software on the Eee PC is another matter. It comes with the applications
you expect: Web browser (Firefox), mail client (Thunderbird), media player
(mplayer?), VoIP software (Skype), office suite (StarOffice), and so on.
However ASUS does not appear to offer an easy way to install additional
software. The best option I've seen so far is to hack the APT config files
to use unsupported Xandros and Debian repositories with pinning to avoid
conflicts. That is option not something I would suggest to Linux newbies.

EasyPeasy (formerly known as Ubuntu Eee) seems to be a popular choice for a
replacement OS, but as a Debian developer I find the lack of availability of
source code and documentation of its internals very disconcerting. I've
played enough with embedded Linux devices to know that an OS on such a
device should be configured to work around the limited-writes issue with
Flash storage: turn off as much logging as possible, map directories for
volatile storage to RAM, and so on. I plan on studying the default setup of
my Eee PC for a while and documenting the important bits before I even think
of doing a custom Linux install. At that point I'm likely to go with Ubuntu
Netbook Remix (https://launchpad.net/netbook-remix).
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