1/20 What I did on my blog's vacation, part 9 of 3
I've been out of it for quite some time, so I thought I'd update on some of the wonderful things that I did during those dark, dark days. People who know what I work on probably have a pretty good idea of where most of that time went (plantin' seeds, yaknow), but it wasn't all Gavin-directed slave driving.
For one, I bought a snappy little netbook. They're quite the thing; all the kids seem to have one. And these days, they're sturdily built, powerful machines for their size. They can run Windows XP and MS Office, and have great multimedia capability.
Unfortunately, mine is not a product of these days.
The eeePC 900 is Asus's first netbook, and one of the first ever. It comes with a 4GB solid state drive but is otherwise spec'd out pretty much like a tiny, cheap plastic hybrid of a Speak & Spell and a Commodore 64. If only the keyboard were as big as the Speak & Spell's.
Actually, with a little gumption you can turn an older model eeePC into a nice little portable. The screen is great, the battery life is decent, and the multi-touch trackpad is pretty nice. First step is to kill the stock OS, which is a customized version of Xandros. That piece of crap choked on even the tiniest videos and web pages. I wonder how these things sold at all. It certainly doesn't do Linux advocacy any favors. So I searched around for a while until I found that some guys had made a eee-specific version of Ubuntu called (not so cleverly) eeebuntu that really whips this thing into shape.
Using the eeebuntu base install and throwing a few extra programs on, I was able to make this thing into a usable machine for browsing with Chrome, writing documents using AbiWord, reading ebooks by rotating the screen, and even watching fairly high-res video on MPlayer. With the 10.1 beta of Flash, little toy netbook processors can now hang in there with YouTube and (on a good day) Hulu. After the OS is in place, you can start upgrading the RAM and SSD and you have a decent machine.
I got the little doodad on Woot for a buck fifty, otherwise I probably wouldn't have it at all (somehow once I hit $200 I expect "real computer" specs), but it seems like they must have sold out stock because they've moved on to the slightly pricier XP-powered Acer Aspires. But if you do find one cheap and you're looking to play around a little, the eeePC 900 is a fun little slice of computer.
For one, I bought a snappy little netbook. They're quite the thing; all the kids seem to have one. And these days, they're sturdily built, powerful machines for their size. They can run Windows XP and MS Office, and have great multimedia capability.
Unfortunately, mine is not a product of these days.
The eeePC 900 is Asus's first netbook, and one of the first ever. It comes with a 4GB solid state drive but is otherwise spec'd out pretty much like a tiny, cheap plastic hybrid of a Speak & Spell and a Commodore 64. If only the keyboard were as big as the Speak & Spell's.
Actually, with a little gumption you can turn an older model eeePC into a nice little portable. The screen is great, the battery life is decent, and the multi-touch trackpad is pretty nice. First step is to kill the stock OS, which is a customized version of Xandros. That piece of crap choked on even the tiniest videos and web pages. I wonder how these things sold at all. It certainly doesn't do Linux advocacy any favors. So I searched around for a while until I found that some guys had made a eee-specific version of Ubuntu called (not so cleverly) eeebuntu that really whips this thing into shape.
Using the eeebuntu base install and throwing a few extra programs on, I was able to make this thing into a usable machine for browsing with Chrome, writing documents using AbiWord, reading ebooks by rotating the screen, and even watching fairly high-res video on MPlayer. With the 10.1 beta of Flash, little toy netbook processors can now hang in there with YouTube and (on a good day) Hulu. After the OS is in place, you can start upgrading the RAM and SSD and you have a decent machine.
I got the little doodad on Woot for a buck fifty, otherwise I probably wouldn't have it at all (somehow once I hit $200 I expect "real computer" specs), but it seems like they must have sold out stock because they've moved on to the slightly pricier XP-powered Acer Aspires. But if you do find one cheap and you're looking to play around a little, the eeePC 900 is a fun little slice of computer.