EeePC follow-up: working with Rev

[Bernard Devlin]

I took my copy of rev 2.9 for linux on a usb stick to the computer store,
and stuck it in the AA1.  And at least on first glance everything worked
(well, everything I tried which was not that much admittedly).  Getting Rev
going with no obvious errors was enough to convince me to buy it.

When I got it home, it said there were updates available and (stupidly)
thinking, "that can't do any harm", I let it update itself, and Rev started
to perform strangely.  The backdrop would no longer appear, and other apps
started to behave strangely (I think there was a backdrop but it was not
visible, and was appearing in the running apps as '??').  I reinstalled the
OS and Rev was working again.  But on closer look there are things that look
really odd about Rev on this umpc (not sure if they are also odd on other
flavours of linux too yet, I'll write about them later as I find more of
them).

I was right about the keyboard - it is fine.  And I was right about the
mouse buttons: pretty awful.  I'd re-arrange the position of some keys (I
think it is logical to have the lowest right hand key to be 'page down' -
they have put the right arrow key there, which there is an argument for
doing too given how space-constrained things are.   Still, typing on it
really is not a problem (well, maybe I've got dainty hands).

The wifi reception is better than any other laptop I've got (including a
powerbook and an ibook).  The battery life looks like it is about 2h40m of
continuous usage.  The screen is very bright with a very good viewing
angle.  And amazingly the laptop doesn't get hot at all - unlike my
powerbook which is also rated at 1.6 ghz (the PB is almost unbearably hot
when in use).

The default software is pretty well integrated, and so far it performs as
well as you would expect a windows laptop of this price range would
perform.  Firefox even plays WMV files.

As the default Linux installation doesn't have multiple virtual desktops,
there's going to be some hacking to make it usable as a development
environment.


Bernard