Thursday, January 17, 2008

Eee PC for President!


Continuing on a theme I made it by the CDW showroom in Vernon Hills yesterday during lunch and stumbled across a black Asus Eee PC on display.

I spent about 15 minutes unsucesfully trying to find the X-Term (it is there through a key sequence I later found it) and trying out various apps (sans Internet one's because there weren't any open hotspots) are the highlights/impressions:
  • The OS was pretty responsive. OpenOffice 2.x loaded slightly faster than on my T-61
  • Keyboard is really small and difficult to type on initially, but one could get use to it
  • Feels cheap but not flimsy
  • Screen is decent
  • Speakers (and web cam) seemed surprisingly good
  • Startup/shutdown was was within a matter of seconds
  • It appeared to be Kwin + ICEWM
  • The trackpad button was really hard to click, took a surprising amount of effort

One downside was the offical ASUS web sites on the product are awful. I couldn't find any decent manuals but I did find the GPL source. Pretty much everthing requires flash but the EeeUser Wiki had lots of good stuff.

Pretty appealing as a portable Linux platform especially if you consider that the 2G versions are around the same price as an Ipod Touch.

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