Someone asked me today how Ubuntu was working on the EeePC. It’s working great! I thought I might share some of my experiences so far, after a bit more use. If you are interested in installing Ubuntu 7.10 on your EeePC head on over to the Ubuntu Community Wiki and find out how!
Travel
This machine is so light I love it. It’s easy to carry around, takes up minimal space, and is really easy to use on an airplane. I’ve been on four flights since getting this machine and it makes for a great little video player (sans optical drive, of course) for using in flight. I simply rip the videos I want down to .mpg or something and throw them on a removable USB.
Productivity
I’ve been on two business trips now since Christmas and this is the only machine that I have taken with me. I have not run into an issue yet with wishing I had something bigger. When I’m using it during the day I connect my USB mouse, and go. Wireless works great, the keyboard is fine once you get used to it. I can do web browsing, chat, email, write code.. pretty much everything I used to do on my MacBook (minus write CD/DVDs and use virtualization).
Recommendations
I really recommend this machine. I really like it, and I’m really glad that my awesome wife bought it for me for Christmas. Man does she spoil me! If you’ve been thinking about it, I’d go for it. It’s cheap, tiny and just as productive as any comparably priced device.
Complaints
The only complaints that I have are:
- There is no visual indication that the CAPS LOCK is on.
- The right-shift key is a real PITA sometimes.
Do yourself a favor if you’re still running the default OS and toss out the Xandros junk and use a real distro.. the one-true Distro, Ubuntu! 🙂
Just curious…I’ve never used Xandros at all, never mind on the EeePc, so I am a bit curious as to why you think it’s junk?
THANK you for that post. Some questions for you:
1. Could you state which Eee model you have? I was wondering if it’s worth the cost to upgrade to an Eee with more bells.
2. My wife is farsighted and I’m wondering if she could use it without frustration. Do you think it’d work OK with slightly-enlarged fonts, or is the Ubuntu default big enough?
3. Startup time with Ubuntu? Does it suspend?
4. How well does GIMP edit, say, a 1920x1200px image? Like if you were to perform a Gaussian Blur. (Graphics guy here)
I think that we are going to see dozens of sub-$500 computers this year. The Eee and OLPC XO are just the tip of the iceberg.
The Noahpad is a slow VIA system, but it is smaller then the Eee with a real hard drive. Also, it comes with Ubuntu 7.10 as the default system.
http://www.pocketables.net/2007/12/e-lead-electron.html
In 6 months, I expect that the 7″ Eee (or similar) will cost $250 and there will be a bunch of 9″ screen’ed (1024×600) computers with touch screens in the $400 space.
Unless the USD tanks…
@Marc
2. I doubt that your wife would like the super-small Eee screen.
3. Why would you want to do this kind of work on a 800×480 screen? A 1920×1200 image is 21 MB in a single layer uncompressed. Even a 650 MHz Celeron will do this if you give it a few seconds.
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:moveshiftkey
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:fixpipeandcapslock
The above links are useful solutions to the caps lcok and right shift problems as well as the bar=Fn+Shift+Z, which is horrbly nasty on a UK keyboard.
@marc&nathan Dbb
Why not? But curves/levels are more important than blur. I scan my films @3000×2000 and would need to adjust those and resize them (imagemagick) + a bit of clone stamp before or after. Do you think this machine is capable of doing such work? What ubuntu version do you suggest, xubuntu, fluxbuntu?
My wife’s 1999 Compaq Deskpro SFF PIII 600 with 256MB, 15GB drive, A Motorola 802.11G PCI card and ATI Rage chip does a fine job with openSuSE 10.3 running full KDE 3.5.X. Anything with a PIII over 400 Mhz and 256MB has sufficient speed to run faster with openSuSE, Kubuntu than XP Pro SP2 on a 2.4 Ghz P4 and 1G Ram with virus, spyware scanners, firewall and Microsoft services including “Genuine Advantage”(which pulls cpu cycles too “phoning home”).