Ubuntucat

I did it. I wiped Mandriva clean off my computer, backed up my important files, and installed Ubuntu 8.10 beta on my Eee PC, and so far the experience has been wonderful. There were a few bumps along the way, of course:

• The first time I copied the live CD contents to my bootable USB key (actually my Sansa Clip player), I tried to boot off it and got some weird busybox error message. So I copied the files again, and the second time I booted, it worked.
• Hotkeys and wireless did not work out of the box (and unchecking the restricted driver in the hardware manager did not work, as some people have indicated it would). However, installing the Eee-specific packages from the repositories and rebooting did help. Volume hotkeys still did not work, but I was able to easily set alternative key combinations for volume, and those did work.
• The annoyance of autologin and the Gnome keyring prompt persists with Network Manager (and, yes, I looked around for solutions and found no working ones—one Launchpad bug seemed to indicate that setting a blank keyring password would solve the problem, even though it didn’t). So I just replaced Network Manager with WICD.
• Resume from suspend-to-RAM works about 2/3 of the time. I still just shut down.
• After removing readahead, though, the boot time is just under a minute, which is a huge improvement from when I had Ubuntu 8.04 installed, which booted in about 1 min 40 sec.
• Shut down initially did not work and required the manual editing of the /etc/init.d/halt file (as had previous Ubuntu releases).

Other than that, it has worked a dream. I’m very happy with Intrepid on the Eee. I did one update and left it at that (if I did daily updates, I’m sure one of them would break things, and as the Eee is my main computer, I can’t afford to have that happen).

To anyone who says I should file bug reports on this stuff while Intrepid is still in beta, bug reports have already been filed on all of these, so the developers are quite aware of these problems. I don’t know if they’re a top priority to be fixed or not, though.

If you read as many reviews of the Eee PC as I’ve read, you’ll know that many of the negative reviews come from people who mistake the Eee for a notebook or laptop. Granted, it looks like a laptop (albeit one hit by a shrink-ray) and does a lot of things a laptop does, but it is not a laptop. People are calling it a subnotebook, a netbook, or UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) replacement. Who knows what name will stick? But this isn’t a total computer replacement any more than your cell phone is (think iPhone and not Macbook).

I was able to replace my desktop computer with an Eee, because I also happen to share a household with my wife, who has a regular laptop (a Macbook Pro), so when I wanted to give a CD mix to a friend, I burned it on my wife’s Macbook Pro (the Eee has no optical drive). The screen on the Eee is tiny—you won’t be doing any heavy graphics editing on it.

The Eee is an internet appliance that also happens to do a few non-internet-related things as well (it has a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a sound recording program, and a music organizer). Mainly, though, it’s great for browsing the internet, emailing friends, and Skyping (I just yesterday tried out video Skype on it, and the webcam and microphone work quite well). There is the occasional website I have to do some side-scrolling with (using the Right arrow key), and if you want to watch YouTube videos, you may want to use Firefox in fullscreen mode (press F11 to toggle back and forth), but it’s a nifty little appliance I’ll think nothing of toting around.

It’s actually made doing laundry bearable (I love reading books in the bathroom or on the bus, but for some reason not while doing the wash), and I’m looking forward to taking it on the plane with me when I visit my parents for Christmas—I won’t have to worry about it weighing down my backpack or being too much trouble to take out for the security check at the airport.

If you find yourself in coffee shops using wireless to blog or check out the latest news feeds and are tired of hauling your 15″ or 17″ laptop around, you may want to check out Asus’ Eee PC (or its upcoming rivals from HP, Dell, and Acer in the upcoming months).

It’s not difficult to get overexcited about a new product when you first buy it, especially if it’s been one you’ve been eyeing for months. Now that it’s been a week, and I’ve had time to use the Eee extensively and tweak it some, I can honestly say I’m happy with my purchase.

Are there things that still annoy me? Hell, yes! But for a product relatively new to the market (think iPods of 2003 or cell phones in 1999), it’s pretty solid. I have finally gotten used to the placement of the right Shift key, but the numeral 1 being so far to the left still throws me off. And, yes, the keys on the keyboard feel as cheap in construction as they did last week, but I’ve noticed that the Eee’s keyboard isn’t as susceptible to cat fur infestation as my old desktop computer’s keyboard was. Plus, for the non-keyboard part of the Eee, since our cat is mostly white and the Eee I bought is black, it’s very easy to notice right away any fur that drifts on to the screen or casing, and I can blow it away immediately.

Through extensive web browsing, I have finally come across some websites that require horizontal scrolling, which has prompted me to install Opera (which allows you to scale pages to fit the width of the screen). I may end up doing a little back and forth switching between Opera and Firefox.

I’ve also realized that I really don’t go out that much to coffee shops and such. It was handy having the Eee with me while I did laundry; but when I’m hanging out with friends, I don’t really need an internet appliance. Mainly, I just use it at home on the couch while watching TV, and it’s nice to have a computer that doesn’t take up so much space (my old desktop had a tower, separate speakers that needed to be plugged in, an external monitor, an external keyboard, and an external mouse). When we do end up traveling (if airlines’ flight prices go down), it will be nice not having to haul a huge 5″ laptop around.

This Eee will serve me well for a while, though it’ll be interesting to see what’s on the horizon for subnotebooks / “netbooks.” HP is supposed to have one coming out soon with a slightly bigger keyboard (with spill-proof keys) and a much bigger hard drive. I think Dell and Acer are supposed to have things in the works, too, to compete with the Eee. And Asus itself will be releasing a new version of the Eee soon, too (larger screen, higher resolution webcam, larger hard drive, more memory, higher price).

If you’ve been following my blog the past few days, you know that I’m excited about my new Eee PC, but you may be wondering why I haven’t posted any pictures up of it. After all, isn’t that what people do when they blog about new gadgets they’ve purchased?

I would post up a picture, but I don’t think pictures do this little-engine-that-could justice. Its main appeal is its cuteness, its tiny-ness. And size is relative. That’s why, after getting a big TV, my wife and I now think every normal-sized TV looks puny. And that’s why all of the pictures floating around web of the Eee PC right now all make hands, other laptops, hardcover books, etc. look huge instead of making the Eee PC look small. We’re used to seeing laptops a certain way, and so they become a point of reference, much like the model skyscraper next to the clay King Kong.

Well, it finally happened: after only three days of use, I’ve adjusted to the size of the Eee, and when I went to use my wife’s Macbook Pro, the screen looked enormous, and I couldn’t type properly because the keys seemed to far apart. I’m now a munchkin, thanks to the Eee PC.

I like the Eee’s default simplified GUI (graphical user interface). I think it’s cute but professional-looking, and it has a kiosk feel to it that would make it easy to use for Windows, Mac, and Linux users alike.

Still… as a Linux user of three years, I do like to customize, so after only three days with the Eee, I have it set up very much like I did my Ubuntu computer before this.

Even though the interface itself doesn’t advertise the fact, the Eee actually runs the IceWM window manager and then has the simplified GUI run on top of that. Since I like keyboard shortcuts, at first I used the IceWM configuration files to use the Windows key (on the Eee, it looks more like a house than a window) in combination with other keys to launch applications. Then, I got annoyed that pressing the Windows key would show the simplified GUI before I hit the second key in the key combination. So I changed my key combinations to Control-Alt-key, but that was annoying, before I don’t like having to press three keys at a time to launch frequently used applications. Then, I tried to move the toolbar to the top of the screen instead of the bottom of the screen, but that covered up the tabs of the simplified GUI. So the bottom line is that the simplified GUI was annoying me, so I following a tutorial to get rid of it and get back to a regular IceWM configuration.

The Eee has some good prepackaged software, but I wanted to add a few things. The tutorial on adding extra Xandros repositories didn’t really work out for me. I kept getting error messages, and then there weren’t that many software packages available afterwards. So I just added the Debian Etch repositories (temporarily—only to add packages, afterwards disabling the additional repositories again). That was nice. I was able to replace Konqueror with Thunar and Kolourpaint with GIMP.

I haven’t tested this out myself, but the general consensus seems to be that the sleep mode (when you close the lid) sucks the life out of the battery quite quickly and won’t last the night, so I followed a tutorial to get the Eee to shut down if the lid is closed when unplugged and sleep if the lid is closed when plugged in. That’s been nice. I don’t mind shutting down this thing, since it takes anywhere between only 24 and 30 seconds to go from a cold boot to a usable desktop.

I also uninstalled the Asus mouse theme package, as the default mouse pointer is huge! So now I have nice, small, unobtrusive mouse pointer.

Now I feel at home with the Eee and less inclined to put Ubuntu on it. Maybe in a few months I’ll get restless and install eeeXubuntu anyway. We’ll see!