There’s something quite sweet about the message that you get from the BBC iPlayer if you’ve yet to download anything. Most software would say something like “0 programmes downloaded” or “Programme Library Empty”, the BBC have gone for something a little more sweet and polite. It gives my inner pedant the same little frisson I get when I see the checkouts at M&S with their signs saying “5 items or fewer.”

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.

“I’m not a fan of the modern railway system. I strongly object to paying twenty-seven pounds fifty to walk the length and breadth of the train with a sausage in a plastic box.”  - Kitty

Over the past two years, i’ve spent A LOT of time zipping up and down the east coast of the UK on the train to meetings in either London or Slough. One thing that’s made it more bearable has been GNER (and more recently National Express East Coast’s) wifi service.

For those who haven’t experienced it, each carriage is fitted with an access point, which is in turn connected to an satellite modem and an array of GSM modems. All that connectivity is then aggregated together to offer a pretty much unbroken connection throughout the journey.

Back in the days before GNER lost the franchise it cost about £7.99 for 2 hours or £9.99 for 24 hours, which was just about justifiable if travelling on business and meant you could crack on with dealing with email and other work while on the move. You also got access free in first class, which made paying £25 for dinner in the restaurant car on the way home an even more attractive option.

Since the move over to National Express East Coast, they’ve made it free to all passengers, which while wonderfully egalitarian, has made the service considerably poorer. Now that everyone can get online for free, the speed has dropped like a stone and it seems a lot less reliable than it once was.  

However, in their favour, the support line are excellent. On a few occasions the system has gone down, a quick phone call and they’ve either remotely rebooted the server or otherwise solved the problem. They even call you straight back if you get cut off using the caller ID from your mobile phone.

However, the support line has never been particularly well publicised, so should you ever need it, here it is: 0845 1254455