eeepc

[rodneyorpheus]

Spent much of the past couple of days playing with Cathryn's new EeePC. It's a wonderful device, a typically solid, well thought out Asus design. And it's so small! Though admittedly that just makes it look exactly the right size when I see it perched on Cathryn's lap, since as we all know, she's a teeny speck herself.

The screen is super small too, but very clear, so the fact that it's only 800x480 isn't too big a problem. And you can connect an external monitor and get more screen space that way, which is nice. It's also incredibly light, which is great, since I'm getting increasingly tired of lugging huge laptops around.

The Xandros Linux OS is almost brilliant, though it has a couple of very annoying niggles:

1. When you update the installed software, there's a bug that makes the icons for some programs disappear, thus making it near-impossible to run them
2. The Xandros software repositiories don't have some very common and necessary Linux programs in them (e.g. GIMP, GnuCash), so installing them means adding new non-Asus repositories, and possibly ending up in dependency hell. Yes, this has happened to me already - I'll probably have to wipe everything I've installed and start again from scratch later this week. Ho hum.
   

So basically if you want to use it as a real computer, rather than just a Web and media appliance, that means installing another version of Linux. And without a DVD drive, that looks like a bit of a bitch. So I reckon getting an external USB DVD drive is the way to go, then putting Ubuntu on it. Or maybe Mandriva, since the new version of that is specifically tuned for the EeePC.

Would I recommend it? Right now, probably not for most people, unless you spend a lot of time walking, or on trains and planes, and/or are a Linux geek. However once Asus fix the OS bugs, and the whole thing generally gets a little more mature, it'll be a killer A1 purchase.