eee

I got an eee pc as a gift and love it. It is the 1000 model so it has a ten inch screen, 40gb ssd (!!!), a gig of ram, 6 hours of battery life, wifi, bluetooth, webcam, everything. Here is a picture of myself taken with the built in camera on the first bootup



So far I love it! This model the keyboard is large enough to type normally without any problems but is still small enough to carry with me everywhere. I did however run into a few initial glitches. The thing runs xandros which is a proprietary linux distribution. Xandros has been nothing but frustrating. Updating did not work out of the box and the asus repositories have practically nothing in them. I just wanted simple things like emacs and rsync but had to seek out other places to install them. So xandros is derived from Debian but is proprietary enough to not support Debian packages. After some tweaking I got the system to a state I am satisfied with.

First I followed this guide to add some free xandros compatible repositories. These still were non ideal but they were enough to install what I needed. I then was able to customize the xp cloned theme with something thinner to make better use of the small screen. Switched the default console to Konsole since xterm is slow and ugly and I have plenty of ram. At this point I was pretty happy with my setup.

Now mostly I expect to do most of my work remotely connected to my desktop. So I figured out how to do some basic x11 forwarding over ssh so I can run some of my graphical applications from my desktop directly on here, such as my email client. X forwarding is cool but lets me run one application at a time and not the full desktop and without sound. So I have to figure out which will be a better solution, something like a remote login with XDMCP or figure out a vnc client for the eee.

Posted from my tiny eee