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That may be why those "cheap" netbooks became more expensive lest they eat into more profitable notebook market share.

Netbooks often Ebay for more than much more capable notebooks because they are such a handy form-factor. eee's with added RAM and larger/faster hard drives are quite popular.

http://forum.eeeuser.com/

Does that mean ASUS had to/has to licence this patent for Bootbooster too? Caching the results from the last boot seems a sensible idea when some modern BIOSes take an age to finish...

T91MT
Battery: 5-6 hours
Weight: 2 pounds
Heat: None
Rotating fan: None

Windows 7 words great with a touchscreen.
-signed
Someone who uses it on a regular basis.

PS, if you have a touch screen and use the built in flicks at all, you really really should try out this app. http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=84092 It takes the default flicks and blows them away.

Debian Eee
Gentoo Eee
EasyPeasy
Ubuntu Of course Ubuntu has a Eee flavor of the kernel, I chose to go a full blown Hardy Heron install on my netbook. I was given mine by a friend who was gonna throw it away. I removed the Xandros that was on it and installed Ubuntu and other than a bit of fun hacking around with it, it's quite useless other than using the terminal. Firefox on the web with it is crap, no memory whatsoever so if you have more than 1 tab open it takes forever to do anything. Forget about compiling something while websurfing cause that won't happen. My advice to people thinking about getting these, for the price if you double it, you get a pretty kick ass laptop these days. Go for the laptop, more power, more space, more ram, more CPU, more functional!

I had similar problems with firefox on my older eeepc running eeebuntu with a 4gb ssd. Creating a loopback file helped a lot of the issues.

They were very cheap, but since the original EeeeeeeeeeeeeePC they've gradually crept up in price and now they're just too expensive for what they are.

I know. There should be vast numbers of $200 netbooks, and there aren't. The PC industry was terrified of that price drop, and with Microsoft's help, managed to fight it off.

I have several of the original EeePC machines. Their Linux has a built-in self-destruct feature. Their "union file system" loses inodes over time. As a test, I have one plugged in and completely idle; it loses about 1% of its inodes per day. When all the inodes are gone, the machine stops working. There is a workaround for this, which must be applied every 90 days of power-on time, or sooner if you actually use the machine. The vendor-recommended procedure, though, is to reinitialize the machine to the factory-empty state, losing all user files.

And people wonder why Linux hasn't succeeded on the desktop.

I had this problem too. Asus have a bunch of suppliers of adapters. Delta are good, the others are bad. If you have a bad adapter the thermal fuse will trip when you plug it in - you can reset it by putting it in the fridge. Best solution is to get Asus to swap your adapter for one made by Delta Electronics

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=73638&p=4

Not all microphone ports are created equal. Some, like the one on the first generation Eee PC, have the ability to automatically switch between line-in and microphone depending on what's plugged into it. YMMV depending on how your audio board is wired.

"The pink microphone port doubles as a stereo line-in socket, depending on what is plugged in to it)."
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/eee_pc_701

Here's something to think about: Things have changed a bit in 20 years (classic ad, passed around more than... you get the idea)

I have found with Gnome though at least, that you can't push a window up past the top of the screen, which has on one ..

there is a way you can turn this off with a simple gconf command check the http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ for details

Ubuntu (Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty) all run fine and there are specialized distros like easy-peasy and eeeUbuntu which just add a customized kernel and extra utilities for managing power, etc. Ubuntu should install with no problems using Unetbootin or the equivalent. There's a good site with hits, etc. http://www.eeeuser.com/. Just check out the forums and distribution discussions.

OTOH, including "all" of Windows XP SP3 seems kind of egregious...

XPSP3 isn't necessarily that big.

nLite can strip it down to 189MB

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:nlitexp

Remember, with a netbook, you don't gain much by lowering the CPUs power consumption to less than 5 watts or so. The reason for this is simple, the display, ram, hard drives and everything else consume enough power that it won't really help battery life very much.

I once posted some power measurements for my Eee 4G here: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/hardware_power_consumption . The celeron M 620 MHz in there only takes 2.5 W when active (I assume that the idle power is negligible), which is still 25% of the idle power consumption.

I have to admit, I'm not sure how to make a netbook more macho but I did customize my netbook.

My EEE 900HA came with a really glossy finish on the cover which made it a fingerprint magnet. I tried to get around this with a can of spray paint, which surprisingly gives a fairly professional thinkpad-like finish.

I figured while I was at it, I'd decorate it with a painted pearljam-alive figure. It wasn't really my intention, but occasionally I do get a comment about Pearljam which is a bit of a conversation starter.

Pic here:
    http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=51953

But if you're looking for something manlier still, maybe you can glue a gun to your netbook or something ;)

But, since you seem to be a windows fan, why not try win7 beta?
I tried it, everything worked out of the box, but i'm a *nix person, so eeebuntu went on it again in my case.

Ask on this excellent eee PC forum: http://forum.eeeuser.com/

There's also a wiki listing several different linuxes: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ (see table of contents on right-hand side)

Ask on this excellent eee PC forum: http://forum.eeeuser.com/

There's also a wiki listing several different linuxes: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ (see table of contents on right-hand side)

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned EeeDora yet, which really is Fedora 8 customized for the Eee. I love it, but then again, I have been using Red Hat/Fedora for about 8 years now. I'm running Fedora on my main development machine, and it's great to be able to sync easily between my Eee and my desktop.

The ISO image download page seems to be out of quota ("This account has been suspended. Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible. "), but you can still get the file easily using Bittorrent: the filename is EeeDora-2008-06-23_01h15m.iso (about 330 MB)(7 seeders when I last looked).

I wrote up some notes on the EeeDora installation process.

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/#custom_eee_linux_distros

Helped me a lot in choosing what distro to go with.

While the device support requirements are a bit different from the old 701 I'm running to the more recent Eee's, all will run Ubuntu's variants fine if you install with the customized kernel from array.org. I'm very happy with Xubuntu. Keep in mind that if you boot with a stock kernel, you won't have wireless working - so at a cat5 cable ready if you get stuck at that stage before the array.org kernel's installed.

There are various enhancements out there for particular models that will give you better support and displays for the function keys, that you can find by checking at eeeuser.com. But you should have a usable system with a stock Ubuntu + array.org kernel.

I'm the same, I've got Xubuntu and compiz running and it's perfect, get some minimal window decorations and you're sorted.

Just do a standard installation, then head over to http://www.array.org/ and follow the instructions to install the kernel which will get your wireless and hotkeys working.

http://www.eeeuser.com/ is an excellent forum if you have any more questions. There are a few threads there that have step by step guides to installing and configuring Xubuntu, but there really isn't much to it beyond getting a custom kernel.

I have a eee701 I've found this to be a handy resource http://forum.eeeuser.com/index.php Mostly I run Xandros on mine, just for convenience. I do however have several distros on thumb drives in case I feel like a change. Just curious because I'm used to people complaining about Vista and how they like XP, what about XP do you not like? Again just curious.

EeeOS is designed to be a minimalistic Custom Debian Distribution that provides a base system (drivers, system tools, Xorg) and nothing more. The idea behind such a release is so that users of Eee Linux OS can configure and build their own Eee experience ... an EeeXperience if you will :P While systems like Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse and Xandros are all amazing in their own right, they often come pre-configured and with a lot of bloat. Some power users prefer to have complete control over their systems and it is with these users in mind that Eee OS was created.

I was going to go on a lengthy explanation about how you could use Slackware or Gentoo to provide the optimal configuration you are interested in but after reading your summary, I doubt you're interested in this sort of devotion to squeezing your eeePC like a lemon over your enemy's eye.

... though I've been told with great enthusiasm that it actually works "out of the box."

Ubuntu has worked "out of the box" for two of my DLink WiFi cards. It worked on a no name CompUSA brand rebate PCMCIA card on my laptop but there were ... annoyances ... with lack of encryption options.

Also, why did you go with an Eee Ubuntu and not Xubuntu ... which I guess would be more widely supported?

I have a 900 (the one with the 900MHz Intel Mobile) and use it mostly for pentesting. I got it because it was a) cheap ($299) and b) has an atheros chipset (for monitor mode and packet injection). I usually spend most of my time on it in Backtrack on a 4GB SDHC --1.5GB for Backtrack proper, 2.5GB for results and persistent config changes. However, I carry the thing around with me to quickly check my IMAP accounts or do a little browsing and I found Ubuntu-EEE. It's 8.04.1 with the array.org changes and the Ubuntu netbook remix on the desktop. I haven't run into any problems with it.

Another great resource is the EEEuser Wiki.

Someone on the eeeuser forums compiled a list of issues with Ubuntu eee on eee901: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=412891

It sucks that a couple of the bugs are pretty serious (shutdown is always unclean, slowly corrupting "/" and pressing the wireless keyboard shortcut will lock the system) because I fell in love with the netbook remix interface. I don't like how eeebuntu did the panels in their netbook edition, so for now, I am dualbooting eee's original Xandros with WinXP.

It worked perfectly on my old 701, by the way, the issues seem to be related to the atom&chipset in the newer eee's.

To answer the last question first: it is the final version, not a beta (although I foresee that some (inherent) bugs will still have to be ironed out in the next weeks or so).
And instead of the EEE version of 8.10, I suggest you install the full (K)(X)Ubuntu and add Adamm's kernel packages for Ubuntu 8.10, which add support for all the problematic devices on the EEE (on top of this they also remove some kernel modules not needed on the EEE, resulting in much shorter boot times).
Here is the link where you can read more about the needed packages: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=46649

I have an Eee. The answer: not very well. Xandros is good as long as you spend a lot of time removing all the crap to make it "friendly". In my mind, it takes a few days of futzing to get it into reasonable shape. (You have to add "advanced mode", which is unfortunately not a menu option. You have to add extra repositories. You have to adjust a number of applications to better handle the smaller screen. Look for the Eee wiki.) My impression is that they designed the UI for novice users, but the only people who are actually buying them are people who know how to futz with them.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu seems to have problems with the wireless on the Eee.

with the limited number of write cycles with the SSD in some models, you want to avoid any unnecessary writes

I've heard this said often, but the only time I've seen any actual numbers crunched, the conclusion was that it wasn't worth worrying about:

With the Eee PC SSD, a typical user (6 hours/day, 10% write rate) will write for 36 minutes per day resulting in a useful lifespan of ~25 years in the worst assumed case [only 50% effective wear levelling, 100k writes to a sector before failure].

Besides, even if that wasn't the case, one of the things about the Eeepc is its moddability -- back up often (which you should be doing anyway), and then if/when the SSD drive goes, swap it for a new one. It'll also probably be a nice upgrade over the smallish original, given the speed that SSD drives are improving in capacity and speed.

In about 10 days you probably won't be able to power it up. See http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=317729#p317729 .

"Eeepc 2G Surf cold boot to X in 10 sec" (the video is quite impressive, even you see the results in the title):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzkQhHaFE0I

Some more details:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=25964

I have no doubt that FreeDOS can do better than that, but I'm actually curious how fast is it? And is the speed so much better that it is better than 10 seconds with a GUI.

I'm typing this right now on an Ubuntu-based system with an nVidia card running dual monitors. There's a number of "user-friendly" methods of installing nVidia drivers, like Envy, but I just do it the good 'ol fashioned way:

(1) Download from nVidia's site, just as you would with Windows drivers.

(2) Stop X
(With a standard Ubuntu install:)
Ctrl-Alt-F1 for command line
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

(3) cd to the directory I downloaded the drivers too

(4) sudo sh [driver-file-name]

(4.5) Type password

(5) Hit "OK" or "Next" a whole bunch of times.

(6) Start X again
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

To configure it (for things like dual-monitors:)

(1) Open a command line while in the gui (I think it's Applications -> Console... something like that)

(2) sudo nvidia-settings

Next time you give it a go try those instructions, or try Envy.

I've also got an EeePC. The pre-installed Xandros really sucks, sadly. If you get one, go ahead and get an SDHC card with it. It can boot from an OS installed on either the main flash drive or the SDHC slot (or something through USB) - which means you can try to install Ubuntu (or another distro - anything but that icky pre-installed one) on the SDHC card without worrying messing up the software it comes with. I highly recommend checking out eeexubuntu. It's got the reasonably noob-friendly Ubuntu goodness tweeked for the eeepc.

Also, one last thing - if you have the time and patience (and aren't already familiar with it), take a look at vi. When I got the eeepc, I found I could not keep up with my professors in class on the limited keyboard - I've been dependent on things like home/end and pageup/down, which aren't quite as accessible as they are on a full keyboard. I was directed by a friend to vi (well, specifically vim) which is a great text editing program that functions fine with the eeepc's limited, cramped keyboard. While it's mostly popular with Linux folk, there's a solid Windows version you can try. It's very, very different and is not user friendly at all, but in terms of typing notes in class the improvement is enormous. I'd recommend you at least give it a look, even if you find it's too much to try to pick up and drop it.

On which note, Amazon, get a bloody move on sending me my Linux 901. It was supposed to be out last month, now you say August 11th?

For what it's worth (if you're in the US), I started looking around for a 901 two weeks ago. From what I could tell from the user forum the Linux 901s were held up at customs in San Francisco until early last week.

You should be getting yours soon. I'll be ordering mine as soon as I can convince my company to pay for it.

60 watts? That's not that impressive. The CeleronM-based EEEPCs (70x, 900, and either the 904 or the 905, I'm too lazy to check) pull about 25 watts while charging[1].

[1]Shamelessly stolen from http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=22855

Anyone have any ideas on Linux on CF (limiting writes etc?)

Here are some links:

• How to: Reduce Disk Writes to Prolong the Life of your Flash Drive
• Even less disk IO section of the eeeXubuntu customization page

Also most other eee laptop configuration guides you can find.

Actually a lot of Linux games work fine on the eee, and many Windows games too (though not the latest power-sucking games, obviously). See http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=35069 for the Games forum on eeeuser.com.

Round based games from today might just even work with them if the graphic is not too fancy. I'm thinking of Games like http://galciv2.com/. Here are even more great games that run on the eee: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/list:games

> This is interesting. Could you point me in the right direction as to how to enable to standard Xandros desktop? My grandad has a 6 months old EEE that works well but I have not figured out on how to run updates - there are a couple of glitches. Any help is appreciated, I am familiar with Linux but have not gone beyond the user interface of the EEEPC.

The article below gives you several ways to do it. We chose "the manual way". Had no problems. You'll need an active wifi connection because it has to download stuff, and you'll lose a little bit of space.

The desktop looks enough like Winders that anyone with pc experience should be able to use it. Even my wife, who's aggressively techno-naive, can make use of it without being coached.

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:getkde?s=advanced

Or Remote Desktop http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=948

Actually SSD wear is really not a big issue as long as you have a reasonable FTL (flash translation layer) in the SSD, which all reputable ones do. Basically you'd have to be writing continuously to the entire disk for many months or years, 24/7, and in reality people and apps don't work like this - people sleep, and apps read far more than they write.

See http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html and also the eee forums which have an FAQ on this - http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit has some good eee specific stuff.

The fact that flash drives have low write speeds is a saving grace incidentally - as they speed up this may be more of an issue, but they are also getting larger meaning more spare blocks for the FTL to swap in (as with hard disk bad block management, sort of).

I've tried playing around with the Eeee PC, and while I can see the appeal, the GUI experience is a bit sucky. Gnome as is, just wasn't designed with a screen that small in mind, and it shows with the amount of real estate consumed by control buttons and what not in proportion to the data.

What's needed is a kind of minimalist mode, where contol buttons and menus don't get in the way, but can be exposed easily and intuitively as they're required. That's going to be a lot of very hard work.

I've tried playing around with the Eeee PC, , and while I can see the appeal, the GUI experience is a bit sucky.

I haven't bought one yet because I need the new wider screen for my wife. When I do buy one I'm following the instructions here:

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu:eeexubuntu:home

Not to dismiss Gnome or KDE, but try Xfce (No, I am not affiliated).

Enjoy,

You don't need a company, a community is more than enough.

This is what I use. An Asus EeePC with a Sierra Wireless 881U via AT&T. I get 3G speeds where I am and using SSH natively. I did have to push the system up to Kubuntu 8.04, but EeeUser at http://eeeuser.com/ has some excellent guides on it.

The EeePC will happily run Doom2, especially if you are keen enough to either set up the Advanced interface or install a different version of Linux (e.g one of the *buntu or whatever you prefer). Easy to do - just follow the EeeUser Wiki - http://wiki.eeeuser.com/
Use something like prboom to run your Doom2 - it works well on the EeePC.
Or even install Windows if you really must (or buy the Windows installed version)
Whist an older laptop may seem a good idea, I would be worried about the battery. Most of these old machines have batteries which have reached the end of their life and will soon crap out. Even if the machine comes with a replacement, it will most likely be a cheap copy with a poor lifespan. Not that the battery life on the EeePC is fantastic I must admit! But you can maximise it if you need to by turning down the brightness on the screen and disabling stuff like the wireless.
The EeeUser website is very useful for info regarding these machines - including modifications such as bluetooth etc for the really keen!

The EEE fits in the glovebox of your car,
battery life is long enough 3-4 hours standard long enough to be able to sit down and do something.
windows 2000 runs nicely in virtualbox taking up 2 gb on an sd card
you can tether it to your mobile
you can connect it to psp
charge your mobile via usb
its not bad in daylight outside
it is not all your hand baggage on a flight.
it plays films perfectly

the eee900 addresses some issues bigger screen and more ssd capacity

I'd like to see some internal usb ports for bluetooth or gps or an expansion bay
that could clip underneath for hard drive and external dvd drive it gets a bit messy when you hook up extra drives. This could be done by a third party battery company the really big extended battery is quite huge and modding it so it could extend under the eee wouldnt be too hard. I carry a slim line dvd drive and a 2.5 drive in the bag i use for the eee.

http://www.eeeuser.com/ this should link to a review of the eee 900
and after reading it i'm not that impressed, the bigger screen seems to be lower quality, the wifi less range. better webcam and more ssd space the charger is now more standard but i like the wall wart and now the system fan is relatively noisy.

The price on ebay for eee 701's seems to have dropped as might be expected and to be honest I think I'd feel only the slightest twinge of initial jealousy if a friend got the eee 900 but thats only for the higher resolution screen.

Actually the eee community has discussed this many times, and the flash world has examined this in depth - it seems that with realistic usage patterns and reasonably good wear levelling there's much less risk of flash wearing out (see http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=7077 and in particular the link in first post to http://storagesearch.com/ ).

However, a system that minimises flash writes will also perform much better, since flash is rather slow at present for writing compared to hard disk or RAM.

I've been reading up a lot on flash drive technology recently, and it's seems that Xandros on the eee has been tuned somewhat to run well on flash (unionfs, run mostly in RAM, etc) to ensure that not to many writes are made to the flash drive. Generally most flash today is NAND based and has 100K write/erase cycles - some embedded-quality industrial flash drives have better ECC, wear levelling and bad block management to go somewhat higher (but you then pay more for the CF or SD card) - so it's important to do this to extend flash drive's lifetime. However the trend is for low-end flash to use MLCs (>1 bit per cell, vs SLCs which have 1 bit per cell) - drives using MLCs typically have even lower flash lifetime (10K write cycles), and the flash drive manufacturers are usually vague on this, particularly the cheaper ones.

The write cycles are across each individual erase block (something like 32 to 128 Kbyte), not per sector/page. Bad block management is critical to 'wear levelling' - as one erase block gets worn out (flagged by ECC) the data is moved across to a new erase block. As long as there are enough good erase blocks and you aren't doing a lot of writes to every part of the drive, there should be enough good blocks around to substitute for bad blocks. There's also work to ensure that if power is lost while multiple pages are written to an erase block, the drive can detect which were written OK - it then reads these and writes them to a new erase block, marking the old erase block as bad. The flash drive has a software Flash Translation Layer (FTL) that hides all this complexity, and the better vendors put more effort into good FTLs.

So... Some care is needed to install another Linux distro, or standard XP, onto the eee - not to get it installed, but to avoid wearing out the eee's flash drives too quickly. There are various flash-optimised Linux distros including Damn Small Linux (DSL, http://damnsmalllinux.org/ Puppy, SLAX, Debian Live (http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/), etc, which manage to write infrequently to flash by running from a RAM disk (with no swap on flash, or at least reduced 'swappiness' parameter) and using unionfs or aufs to map a RAM drive 'over' the flash drive, allowing writes to be delayed until much later, and thereby minimising number of flash writes. DSL writes only when you shut down, or on demand, and Puppy writes every 30 minutes or so. Generally, Live CD distros are quite easily adapted to run well with flash, whereas hard disk distros do not run well on flash.

Ubuntu for eee looks very nice if you like Ubuntu, but doesn't do any flash optimisation that I could see from its wiki (apart from recommending use of noatime in fstab which is quite basic) - perhaps someone has done this as an add-on though. XP embedded apparently has some tweaks to do the same thing as Linux, but you need to be quite a techie to find and apply the flash optimisations, compared to simply installing Damn Small Linux which is already flash optimised.

There seems to be a lot of confusion on this - a good summary of this from eee perspective is http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=297632. However, some people actually advocate removing unionfs from the eee Xandros setup in order to gain some flexibility, without even mentioning the issue of increased flash wear - see http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:removeunionfs which also suggests use of ext3 which will further increase flash writes (default is to write to log every 5 seconds typically). This is a really bad idea... I would really suggest reading up on this before changing the default setup, which uses unionfs in a similar way to DSL and Puppy Linux to minimise flash writes.

Does anyone know a major distro that runs on the eee and is already flash optimised to minimise writes?

There are XP drivers available for the 2G and 4G models, and given that the hardware has not changed much I am sure they work on the 20G model. As well there is a great user forum dedicated to Xp on the eee PC

We all live in Microsoft centric world.

You only need to browse a little http://forum.eeeuser.com/index.php to notice there really is need for Windows version for the EeePC, there are a lot of people who rather run XP.

Oh, I have EeePC and the Xandros is definitely worse than XP would be. Maybe Ubuntu 8.04 will fix all the problems, maybe, the beta apparently does not. I have EeeXubuntu and it needs a lot of tuning and still the wireless is unreliable. Something average Jane/Joe certainly is not happy about.

And If the Windows version would cost, say, $50 more I wouldn't be surprised if it would sell better. Add some crapware and the $50 difference is going to be quite a high estimate.