brehaut, mattw and fraser have eeePCs

The best resource is the eeeuser wiki.

Brehaut’s impressions

Overall, its a pretty sweet machine. The default OS is fairly nice and easily supports customisation. I’m currently running an IceWM session and mostly falling back to terminals for everything. Matt and Fraser were both using KDE3 last time I checked. Following the instructions on eeeuser for setting up additional respositories seems like definite must to me.

I would say the biggest weakness is the 4Gig drive, while its fairly easily expandable with an SD card, you start out with 2.4Gig of usable space, which while ok is going to cause problems in the long term.

The 7” screen has been totally fine for me needs so far, although the rumoured 8” and 9” models will make multitasking and dealing with large dialogs much better.

Addendum – Jan 27th

I have had this machine for a week, and am very happy with it. Like Matt I have upgraded the RAM to 2gig and added an 8 gig SD card.

I have switched to XFCE4 as my primary environment with nautilus as my file manage. IceWM while nice in some regards is not polished, a bit clunky and occasionally spazed out. XFCE has much better workspace management and panel tools too.

With regard to eee/Xandros, the old packages are a bit of a pain. Particularly Glade3 isn’t in the repo and is a bit of a plague to install from source — requires CPAN to do its thing — and evince is an incredibly crusty version from 2005 that I wouldn’t foist upon anyone. Its lack of support for even slightly complex PDFs means that even acrobat reader is better. I would be happy with a newer emacs, but it doesnt really hurt me much. {Oh wait. i might be hosed for glade3, it needs GTK+2.10.0 or newer and i only have GTK+2.8.20 – grr}

Enlightenment DR 17 was both fun and sad. As a project that was showing promise back in 2003 its disappointing that they have now well and truely behind basically every other environment in actual useful functionality.

eeeXubuntu is in the future for this machine I think.

June ‘08

A couple of months back my eeePC stopped booting but I had my new Mac so it was no big deal. With the help of Angus and Chad I got Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) installed via the SDCard and tweaked. There are handy scripts and notes on the eeeuser wiki to get everything running nicely.

The wireless support is the most patchy now, as the drivers need to be recompiled whenever the kernel upgrades. The machine is also much slower to boot; but I’m happy to take that and get a significantly more usable machine.

Also installed is Wine and Baldur’s Gate 2 which is running nicely.

Matt’s impressions

I’m a bit rusty with my linux-fu, and I’ve been spoiled by my Macs. Having to manually manage wireless network connections and the like seem a little odd.

I really need to stop mousing all the time, and get back to the keyboard. I’m not sure that KDE is the best thing for this. I’d like something a little more lightweight than KDE, too, but I really need to allow a day or so to set it all up properly.

I like that everything’s hackable; I don’t like that there’s five different packages attempting to solve any given problem. Still, Synaptic is pretty cool for installing said packages. (Although Xandros suffers from Debian’s “everything is five years old” syndrome.)

Hardware-wise, the thing is great — fast boot, quiet, not too hot. Battery life is okay. Disk a bit small, but my 8GB SD should help that. Keen to see what more RAM does for it.

I won’t be doing web layout on it much, I suspect (although FFx3’s full-page zoom would make it possible), but coding should be absolutely fine. Emacs + Terminals is great, Thunderbird is far nicer in linux than on mac, Firefox 3 is actually mighty nice, and Pidgin is tidy and works pretty well (for all that it’s no Adium :/. )

Matt couldn’t handle the five-year-old software that comes with Xandros/Debian. He caved, re-formatted, and now has a nice eeeXubuntu installation.

Pros:

• Emacs has real fonts! Unicode! TTF! Maybe even a little anti-aliasing; it’s hard to tell; maybe not!
• Far nicer wireless networking
• More up to date software
• An actual nice-looking interface

Cons:

• Slower boot time (a little under a minute to the login screen)
• Battery monitor has some crappy warning on startup
• It’s a little slow as it currently stands. I may need to try get some cruft off it, or maybe consider the possibility of a lighter window manager still.
• No on-screen displays for volume and screen brightness controls.

Fraser’s impressions

I can run XFCE on it now. Is good.