On the last day of November I recieved a truely wonderful parcel, within its cheap cardboard packing lay a marvelous peice of computing history: the ASUS eee notebooky thingy.
As you can tell by the time differential between the publishing of this article, either: I have been busy with coursework; the eee has stolen my soul; or someone has sneekily made good use of a 'publish story later' feature in their CMS.
The Eee has just about everything you could want from a portable system, well apart from a big screen, but it would not be as portable (nor cheap) with a bigger screen.
They say Linux is highly customisable, and the Xandros Linux distrobution that comes pre-loaded on the machine prooves that, by being the 'chocolate teapot' of the Linux range. Apart from its 'could be, but just isn't XP' looks, the distrobution has nothing going for it. Repositories? No we don't need them! Compatability with repositories for any major distrobution? Why would we want that! So off I go in search of some useful version of Linux. Connect to a authenticated network? Are you mad!
Please note, this is after 2 days of owning the machine. If it could connect to the internet at university the machine would be pretty useless to me, after all what do you think I do in lectures? So after some faffing about -- Linux still has some problems with usability, but thankfully most of them are to do with setting up the system, and a unconventional resolution of 800x480 does not help either -- I got my copy of Xandros running smoothy. I even have some snazzy transparent effects after messing about in the system files, but Compiz Fusion did proove to be too much hassle, even for one of my Linux guru friends...
Anywho, it seems ASUS hid an evil 'WARRANTY VOID IF BROKEN' sticker on the bottom of the system, to stop users from installing more RAM, which probably would break after 2 years of use anyway. Thankfully, ASUS have decided to ignore the sticker themselves, so all eee users can happily upgrade to 2 gigabytes of RAM. (Like me!)
The system does all my tasks, and does them well. Open Office prooves to get better with every release; the wireless card works wonders; Netbeans 6.0 runs smoothly, and starts up really fast if you mess around with the memory settings; Firefox runs a charm; and I get the chance to learn how to use Linux properly. The machine makes me want to install Linux on my desktop, but the little gamer in me will not fall for that one!
Overall a great machine, everyone seems to want one, so get ready to queue alongside them!
