Asus eeePC - The first 72hrs
Friday just gone saw my birthday present to myself, an Asuseee PC 701 , finally come into stock. I ordered it about 2 and a half weeks previously from of all places Toys R Us, which didn’t help with trying to convince people at work that yes, it was a real laptop. So, a few first impressions…
These things are like hens teeth at the moment in the UK, extremely hard to find, with all of the online retailers almost constantly out of stock and generally whenever they do get a delivery only having enough to satisfy their ever growing lists of backorders. A tip off over at the eeeuser forums had suggested that Toys R Us had a fairly reliable supply and following calls to some other suppliers who were quoting late March delivery at the earliest, I figured what the hell and put in a pre-order.
So, having finally got my mitts on one, what do I think? It rocks! It’s a fully featured laptop (pretty much the only thing missing is an optical drive) in a tiny package. While it will never be a desktop replacement, it’s perfect for chucking in a bag for a train journey or to take away for a couple of days. Also, unlike pretty much every other laptop i’ve ever used, the charger is the size of a mobile phone one. So you don’t end up with and ultra small laptop and a sodding great power brick to carry around!
I very quickly decided that the bundled xandros linux while pleasant enough was a bit to Janet and John to make the cut in the long term and plumped to install eeeXubuntu (a tweaked version of Xubuntu for the eee)
Installation was pretty simple, download a live CD, boot from it on my desktop machine and run a script to create a bootable image of the CD on a USB stick.
That stick was then in turn used to boot the eee, and a click of the install icon on the desktop started off the installation process. Having done a bit of reading up i’d worked out that I didn’t really want to use a swap partition, having upgraded the eee to 2GB of RAM, not using swap saves wear on the SSD Flash drive. So instead I opted for one big 4GB partition, this caused the installer to error fairly unhelpfully, but eventually I worked out that the installer needs some free space left for some reason during install, so setup a 3Gb partition instead. (Later, once fully installed I used gParted to resize the partition to just under 4Gb.
Once installed there’s a few tweaks you can install to get things working perfectly and generally soup things up a little, the eeXubuntu wiki details them all. The best though is Compiz Fusion, which does the whizzy desktop window effects, everyone i’ve shown it to has really been impressed by it, it’s also damn useful for managing multiple windows on the eee’s smallscreen.
Speaking of which I had worried that the 800×480 screen would be a little too small, but so far it’s been ok. With the addition of a mini theme in firefox to make best use of the space you can watch youtube vids just fine and most sites render capably in the space.
Getting fusesmb working reliably to mount some shares on my Windows XP desktop PC was a bit tricky, but I got there in the end, I also found a neat little script which runs when the wifi connects, checks if the connection is to my home wifi network and if it is, then it mounts the shares, if not it doesn’t.
So overall, i’m loving the eee, some minor niggles like not being able to hibernate it (2Gb of RAM requires 2GB of free disk space to hibernate) but shutdown and bootup is still speedy enough for that not to be a massive problem.
Interestingly though, while the eee may sell a lot of units to people who’ve never used linux before, I doubt many of them will venture beyond Xandros, getting it working just right in Xubuntu still required quite a bit of effort (and I’m no linux wizard) but I guess that can only get better with time.
The only depressing thing about that is that it means they’re likely to sell a lot more eee’s with XP installed, and I doubt (though haven’t tested) that it will be nearly as fast a little machine under XP.
Good review, I totally agree. Compiz is a great addition for working on this small screen.
How did you get the fusesmb working in the end? Is there a how to somewhere as I have installed it but really can’t get it to work from my mac!
I did get it working in the end, but it did take A LOT of messing about and several attempts. To be honest, I think it was more luck than judgement and it’s long enough ago that I’m now not sure how! Sorry!