[OT] Eee PC - got one?

[Andre Garzia]

Richard,

I have one! :D

Talking about the hardware first. Everything work as expected. The
wifi and the camera are fine, the disk is fast and you can get used to
the keyboard.

Now the system. The EEE PC comes with a modified Xandros distribution
which means it is a modified debian whose windows looks like Windows
XP.

The system comes in "basic mode", this mode makes the UI behave like a
PDA. You have a backdrop with a tab panel with category labels such as
"internet", "work", "play" and inside this panels you can access the
applications for that category. Very easy to use. Applications usually
opens full screen so it's very user friendly.

You can set the Xandros to boot into "Advanced mode" which will give
you a full KDE desktop. For those familiar with linux this will be a
blessing since the basic mode is kinda hard to customize (there´s no
built-in way to add apps to the panels). With the advanced mode, you
have a small linux desktop and can do all linux can. Beware that
Xandros is missing gcc & friends, so you must install it if you plan
to add linux applications from source files.

I´ve also installed Ubuntu in a SDHC card and tried it, it performed
fine, I lost a SDHC during a hard reset with the card mounted, it
broke the card beyond repair. :-/

Living in a Linux land means tweeking your system. We´re used to MacOS
X working out of the box, with the EEE PC you can expect lots of work
to customize things to your tastes.

The resolution is too small, some applications will open bigger than
the screen so you´ll need to ALT+Drag them so you can use the app.
Revolution works fine but complains about the resolution, we need some
7'' plugins to make Rev UI more usable.

So far I am very impressed with the machine, I am running Netbeans 6.1
with Java 1.6 SE with no problem (my university teaches java), it´s
not even slow.

the weight, form factor and cost makes this a wonderful machine.

Best
andre


-- 
http://www.andregarzia.com All We Do Is Code.