13 February 2008
The other week I picked up an ASUS eeePC Linux based laptop from, believe or not, Toys ‘R’ Us, for an incredible £220 GBP ($429 USD). I have recently started commuting to London on the train with around a 40 minute journey time, so for me this was a purchase that would save my sanity and hopefully my (considerably more costly) MacBook Pro from being stolen. It’s small enough to have on one knee so don’t worry about a table and I’m currently using it to surf, code in Ruby, read books and watch videos.
The strange thing is it seems to be marketed at kids (Toys ‘R’ Us are one of the few places you can pick it up), it contains some educational software and a dumbed down interface (more on how to change that later). Once you boot into advanced mode, it’s a very capable machine with a familiar looking interface (KDE). So without further ado, here’s some more detailed info.
Hardware
This thing is tiny. The LCD is a mere 7 inches, weight is under 1kg. In this shell you can find an Intel 900Mhz processor with hardware accelerated graphics (runs Quake 3 fine), 512MB RAM and a 4GB solid state hard drive (which I have expanded using the built in memory card reader). There’s 3 USB slots for external drives or devices, and of course 802.11b/g WiFi. Battery life is around 3.5 hours.
Software
It comes pre-bundled with a lot of good stuff, and no crap. This includes Open Office, Adobe Reader, Firefox and Thunderbird, Skype, Messenger (Pidgin), Anti-Virus, Media Players and converters, eBook readers, image editors, and general utilities for doing most of the things you need to, I was actually suprised at the collection of things it comes with, even compared with OS X. They seem to have identified a lot of common tasks even if some of this is hidden away in the realms of command line programs. I’m going to attempt to run the Flex SDK on there, I think Eclipse might be pushing it but Linux has its fair share of decent text editors.
Operating System
Pre-installed is a branch of Xandros Server 2.0 (which is in turn based on Debian). This means you can use something like Synaptic (sudo synaptic on the Terminal) to install applications and games from the internet. It also means you can generally find help on advanced topics on Xandros or Debian forums. You can install Windows XP from external CD drive or memory stick, but I love the fact that my OS is taking a mere 30MB of ram when idle, and I’ve been wanting to learn a little bit more bash since I last dabbled as a kid. Alternatively there’s an Ubuntu branch.
Help and Community
The eeePC has a thriving community including a Wiki and forum. On there you can find introductory tutorials to Linux, to gaming, installing other operating systems, using mobile phones as modems and so on. There’s something about the little device that seems give its users an affinity with it, and that’s reflected by the sheer amount of blog, forum and wiki content you can find out there. Ease of use is never going to be on par with OS X or Windows, but it’s really not going to affect you unless you are a power user, and then you deserve it. 
Conclusions
So as you’ve probably guessed I’m really happy with this. It’s definitely not gonna make a dev machine (unless your an old skool hacker), but it will let you do 90% of what you need when you’re away from your home or office and in my case it’s forcing me to learn some new languages. My recommendation is run out and get one today. 
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