Tag Archives: eeePC

On the weekend I bought myself a new toy. It’s the ASUS eeePC. At around A$500 it’s one of the cheapest laptops on the market at the moment. It sports:

• a 7in LCD screen 800×480,
• 900MHz Intel CPU,
• 512MB 667MHz DDR2 ram,
• 4GB solid state hard drive (it is basically an SD card),
• 802.11a/b/g WiFi
• 3 USB2.0 ports,
• 10/100 Network,
• integrated stereo speakers,
• 3½hrs battery life (I’ve had 3 hours at full brightness),
• SVGA out (untested for max resolution), and
• webcam.

It comes pre-installed with a myriad of applications and would be relatively friendly for most people to use… for a linux distro… Oh, did I mention… It’s NOT Windows based!. Rather it’s built on a very customised Xandros build. The interface is not too bad once you get use to it, but there is a quick install to go to a more full Xandros desktop:

• drop to a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T)
• sudo apt-get install kicker ksmserver
• reboot

You can make this permanent by going to Settings –> Personalization and change the login mode to Full Desktop mode, but this is far from ideal. If you watch it boot up, the e actually boots twice, once into normal (easy) mode and then reboots into advanced mode.

So far I am very impressed with the unit, albeit that I am use to a more flexible linux distro, this interface does suit the eeePC perfectly.

This device lends itself to much modding, just google eeepc hack.

I will report more on this later. Stay tuned for my WiFi walk!