Yet Another [À Compléter]

Yep that’s right. I was talking about something great for today and it happened, I got my shiny Asus EEE .

Some shoots of the unpacking below :

The package.

Shoot of the box.

Opening Ali Baba’s cavern.

First sight of the beast

Opened without the battery.

The rest of the box.

The welcoming screen in easy mode (the battery is normally located in the hole between the keyboard and the screen).

Mandatory screenshot .

System info.

Some impressions. First of all the machine is really small. Those who compared it to a plied A4 paper are completely right. But even with the small screen the image is very clear and readable (which was one of the thing I was afraid of when I bought it). It’s also ridiculously light and easily transportable (as it’s supposed to be anyway).

I ran it on battery for a while (browsing, playing videos, doing some console stuff) so battery life seems great. The only ventilator (cooling the CPU) is very discrete which, together with the SSD-based disk, allow a very silent system.

Keyboard is indeed tricky to get used to (some touch, like the numbers at the top, are a little translated compared to a normal keyboard) but after some learning time I was typing without problems (even with my big fingers). The trackpad is also very small and I found the right part (used to scroll in windows) to be really hard to use. I guess my next gift will be one of these micro mouse.

The base system is a modified Xandros running IceWM and some parts of KDE and, once you get the shortcut to launch a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T), administering it is a breeze if you already use a Debian or Debian-like distribution. All in one I found the whole system to be very fluid even with the limited resources of the machine (600-something MHz downgraded processor and 512Mo of RAM) with every applications (including OpenOffice) starting reasonably fast. I probably won’t digg any deeper in the OS as I plan to replace it.

I will add more photos once I put Arch on it (I already switched the system in « Expert » mode thanks to this howto). A bare Openbox session together with a small AWN bar, for launching and tracking the applications, will do the trick (since the EEE has an Intel chipset, Compositing support is good).

Btw, I have to give this baby a name (just « My EEE » isn’t that great). Nosfer suggested that I call it « La Vache » (pun with my name, here is what it means). I was reticent at first but in the end… why not ? . So let me introduce to the world « Vache », the EEE PC :

That’s all for now folks.