Comments on: Readers, I got the Asus Eee PC

By: PeaceBang

PeaceBang — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:13:09 +0000

Even the name sounds like a squeal of cuteness!

By: Peregrinato

Peregrinato — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:25:02 +0000

SO CUTE!!!

By: Peregrinato

Peregrinato — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:40:54 +0000

It’s a date!

By: Scott Wells

Scott Wells — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:08:27 +0000

@Peregrinato. Good questions.

You can buy an Asus Eee from any number of online retailers, like Amazon or Newegg.
The default word processing software — really the one you find on just about every consumer-orientated Linux distribution — is the Writer part of the OpenOffice.org office suite. If you use MS Word in MS XP, you can use OpenOffice.org intuitively or nearly so. But I would want to add the Base (database) part if you want to mail merge or do high-end bibliography work.
Others might not know we’re neighbors. Do you want to see the default Asus Eee before I install the eeeXubuntu? Let me know.

By: Peregrinato

Peregrinato — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:13:23 +0000

Where does one get one? And what word processing capabilities does it have? And…I’m not an Ubuntu or Linux person. Would it be a major pain to learn something like this?

(Looking for an alternative to carry to school that “lugging” is not the appropriate term. I dropped my powerbook and my dell laptop is a widescreen gaming rig. It doesn’t travel except to conferences.)

By: David

David — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 09:32:42 +0000

I think the Eee PC looks kinda funny in any color other than black. I think it’s the speakers beside the screen or something.

By: Fr Chris

Fr Chris — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:27:14 +0000

I saw the Fry review — he’s great. :-) I agree, though, that Linux is probably ready to start slowly chipping away at Windows’ hegemony; it is not well placed to overturn things and steal massive market share.

Having been a Linux guy from way back, I appreciate how user-friendly Ubuntu is compared to those days, but there are still a number of things that take a lot of work at the command line to get running. I don’t see many folks who are not like me being willing to do that work to, say, get their Guitar Hero guitar working for Frets on Fire, or get non-standard WiFi drivers working or something.

By: Scott Wells

Scott Wells — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:38:33 +0000

Oh, and how could I forget?

Stephen Fry, the actor and man-of-words, got one and loves it. Though as much as I like Linux, I think he oversells it.

By: Scott Wells

Scott Wells — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:29:35 +0000

@Fr. Chris. No, thanks for the F11 tip, which gives a full screen view. If I don’t stick with the default OS, then I have the eeeXubuntu already downloaded.

Thanks for the later tips.

Oh, and I not knowing you had gotten one, I was thinking of you since I know you travel for church purposes. We tested the Eee on the Day Job Dell projector and it worked like a charm after a restart. For presentations and trainings, perhaps.

By: Fr Chris

Fr Chris — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:36:47 +0000

I got a 4g surf for $330 on newegg a few weeks ago and absolutely love it. Upgraded the RAM to 2gb, threw in an 8gb SD card for extra storage, and it’s brilliant. I hope to take it on trips — even work ones — instead of my far heavier and bulkier MacBook Pro.

I hope you’ve learned about hitting F11 in Firefox already. That makes it far more usable.

I ended up installing stock Ubuntu and it works rather well with a few tweaks. If I had to do it over again, I’d probably install eeeXubuntu, which is supposed to be smaller and faster. I’m contemplating compressing the /usr directory with squashfs and unionfs — that’s supposed to save about a gig.