Slashdot Mirror
In Search of the Cheap Linux Laptop
mr_mischief writes "According to Hot Hardware's recent review, Asus is getting ready to unleash a $199 compact notebook running Linux. This is entirely different from this recent $150 Linux laptop story which many Slashdot readers believed to be a scam. There's a dual-mode menu which offers a simple system for novice computer users, and a slightly more advanced version for others. It's not aimed squarely at the same market as the One Laptop Per Child project's XO, and is expected to be sold to end users worldwide. It's targeted at new users who don't own a computer or at people who want a cheap, small laptop for basic tasks. The reviewed version has a 7" screen and a cramped keyboard to match, but a 10" version is available for $100 more. It offers built-in wired and wireless networking, four USB 2.0 ports, and a three-hour battery life. The storage options are a bit cramped, as you only get 4 GB of on-board storage (8 GB on the $299 model) and no optical drive. As the review says, though, USB 2.0 can make up for that if you like, and the lack of moving drive parts makes the machine run dead quiet."
I was thinking about adding a single board computer to my hen house to control a few things: Cameras, Stepper Motor and a maybe a relay for a fan... But if laptop's keep getting cheaper I will consider the monitor and keyboard there for diagnostics (too bad it can't be powered over Ethernet!
Anony Mouse!
Toshiba do a 32GB USB flash drive, so storage isn't a problem :)
What confuses me as soon as it says "$100 more" is that you are at $299 and for another $150 you can wander into BestBuy and splash $450 on a decent laptop that comes with Vista. Knocking $80 or what ever for the OEM version means that you are talking $370 or so for a decent laptop with a decent screen and a decent disk et al and this is for something with a dual core Intel processor.
Now given Moore's Law around the hardware, and screen real estate, its a bit odd that $299 gets you a computer that is that crap. Now I can see why at the $100 limit you'll be cutting loads of corners especially if you want it to work on low power, but the concept of a $299 machine with crap specs doesn't sound cheap.
$100 means cutting lots of corners, but at $299 it just sounds, somewhat bizarrely, like a bit of a rip off.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
$199 is crazily cheap - a LOT of people will buy one of these to "surf the internet and do some typing". Plenty of folk will immediately install bootleg XP on this, but I think the majority will leave Linux running, so long as it "just works".
If you're going to use that much RAM then chances are you're using applications that require a lot of processing power. So you'll need more fans and there will be more heat. These laptops are designed for basic and quick tasks like checking email quietly and easily.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've been reading about these for several weeks now, and am really looking forward to it. Anyone who remembers the i-Opener (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener) will grin to think that this, while slightly more expensive (less than double, when considering inflation, though -- and it's a laptop!) will come with Linux by default.
... tap out some notes. (I esp. like "View Your Mind" -- I hope that will run nicely on the Eee; on the 7" screen it might be annoying, but Hey, not too bad, I bet.)
:))
... eh, it sucks. Hopefully, the 10" screen version will be out soon after the 7".
I want one for school: taking notes is such ludicrous misemployment for my main laptop; I cringe each time I carry it back and forth to my law school classes to
I want one for the car / other travels: portable audio player, and (I hope!) a cool basis for a GPS system using GPS Drive (http://www.gpsdrive.de/) or similar. Can anyone recommend any works-from-the-box GPS modules for a typical Linux system?
Something this size and price, I'd feel justified to take on nearly any kind of travel -- not so much bigger than the Visor Deluxe stolen from my car a while back plus the portable keyboard for that. (Anyone want to send me a no-longer-used Visor Deluxe, so I could rescue the data from my backup cart?
The screen
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Screw the optical drive. The Armada M300 I've already mentioned somewhere above doesn't have one (it's in the docking station), and there was exactly one (1) situation when I wished I had it. I don't even use the one in the docking station either, I now just pop the CD/DVD into one of my desktop drives and use the network share to access it. Skipping the CD/DVD drive means thinner laptop plus lower cost and weight, so I'm all for it.
The 8GB flash drive is a much more limiting factor though, as it means I won't be able to store as much pr0n and warez^W^Wuseful business data.
The point we are at right now is that there has been little advance in merging components. Computers got cheap, in part, to VLSI. Now, instead of creating a single chip laptop, we have dual cores. To get to the holy grail of the computer so cheap that we buy it for no reason, the device count has to go way down. A couple chips, a couple ports, and a screen. It may even have to have a fake keyboard, just like the cheap computers of the 80's, which, btw, were also just a few chips and few ports.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Overall, this sounds like an amazing computer for school. About 2 pounds? That small? Awesome. However, I've got a few questions.
How easy is it to install additional programs? I'd assume they'd attempt to limit that in the basic interface, with only a few choices from preselected packages. With the advanced interface though, can you install anything you want? Do you get access to the terminal? Is there apt, yum? Something similar to Synaptic so you don't have to use the terminal? Only packages approved by Asus, or can you access any repository you want?
It says that the laptop is Windows compatible. I assume this means that the user can install another OS by themselves. With lack of an optical drive though, will it boot from the USB to install? What about drivers, such as for the webcam?
All in all, it sounds like a great deal. The small screen bugs me a bit, but what do you expect for the size?
Consciousness - That annoying time between naps.
There's a decent entry already (with plentiful links to other articles etc) already up. Since Wikipedia allows a different kind of information aggregation than does Slashdot, I hope lots of people (accurately ;)) extend what's there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
With the increasing number of quality web apps (gmail, google docs, meebo, facebook) A small computer
that can run firefox would be really useful. Obviously requires a good net connection. So many peoples
use of a computer now falls into wordprocessor + email + web browsing for which a small portable computer
is fine. And with the rise of web apps it is increasily becoming just web access thats required.
Here we have a brand new low cost platform that comes preinstalled with Linux. All the ney-sayers are simply yelling sour grapes because Microsoft will not be able to field anything like this in North America or Europe in the foreseeable future.
I am going to buy two for my grandkids - they will love it. They'll be able to play music and TV off the home wireless network. They can VoIP with video using Skype. They can read books from Project Gutenberg. They can message and chat to their hearts content. Hey, they may even do some homework and learn something, Who Knows!
For me, I can add a 22" LCD monitor and create a wireless multimedia node for the bedroom. I can also use it as a smart thin client with USB keyboard & mouse and some speakers.
Add some external storage like a 2.5" 120 gig HD and some earbuds and I can listen to music or avi's until the batteries wear down. I can store all my contact information and write some emails, Skype some friends (VoIP with video), message, play games and chat for hours away from my desktop computer.
This machine is great and I for one am going to promote it to all my friends including the ones that are afraid of computers.
What a great standby machine!
Just so you know, I have 3 laptop computers 'Dell Inspiron 5100 - big, hot and heavy', 'Toshiba Tecra 8200 - smaller, lighter but tied to the power supply now' and 'Dell Latitude CPx - nice but slow, also tied to the power adapter'. These machines, for one reason or another, are unsuitable for newbs and kids whereas the Asus 3ePC looks perfect.
I have no problem with the screen layout the way it is - there are speakers on either side of the screen and a microphone and camera there as well.
All that power, connectivity (WiFi b/g, Ethernet 10/100, modem and USB), excellent memory - 512 meg, sufficient storage with USB addons as required, stereo speakers, microphone, web camera, 3 hours on battery AND it comes with an OS with a FULL office suite, Firefox, Skype, email and lots of applications!
All for $199!
LOOK OUT MICROSOFT!!!
This is the killer product Linux needs to get it's foot in the door - this machines will sell in all the usual outlets plus drug stores, gift shops and grocery markets if promoted properly and Asus may be the guys to do it.
Yep - put XP on that thing and it will be a pig with no room left for anything else. With a light-weight Linux, perhaps Ubunto or Kubunto or even Slax, and the user may really haved something.
This is just my two-bits but I am excited.
Undead Ed
It's cheap enough, but it's not small enough. I have a laptop with a 15" screen, I paid over $2000 for it. I never use it because it's too damn big. It has actually sat in my closet for over a year at a time. I don't even take it with me on vacations anymore because it's just too big to bother with.
This laptop is sufficient for my needs, and I'm likely to actually carry it because it's small and light enough to be reasonably carried around most everywhere.
I could imagine that a lot of people would pry the things open and fix/hack the hell out of it... People are even repairing laptop battery cells, so why not repair the notebook itself? For that price, you can as well have a go at it before throwing it away.
The bulk of my work that isn't fixing stuff is done with vim over SSH and a web browser. Firefox is getting a bit heavy, but it only has the one or two tabs I need for the app I'm developing -- Konqueror can handle the rest.
There are other nice things you could do, if you bother to set it up. For instance, instead of carrying a half-dozen boot CDs or DVDs, you could bring this and a crossover cable, and use that to "jump start" someone's computer. Might even prove a good analogy, when someone asks what you're doing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...I'm quite happy with my Dell Inspiron E1505 "n series."
For $650, I got Ubuntu (although I quickly converted it to my preferred KDE-based Kubuntu), 1 gig-o-ram, a 1.73 Core Duo (low-power Centrino version), an 80 gig hard drive, WiFi, firewire, 4 USB ports, a 15.4" glossy widescreen, 802.11 g/n WiFi, darn good battery life, and a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive.
Granted, this is not US$199, but I think it's a pretty good deal for what you get. I'm generally a Mac buyer, but I feel like I got something similar to a $1,199 MacBook. Even though I think the MacBook is still a nicer machine--with better industrial design and OS X/iLife--but for $550 less, I've got a not-bad-looking laptop, a great/stable/secure OS, and tons of free apps that rival iLife (i.e., Picasa in place of iPhoto, Amarok instead of iTunes).
My only complaint is that I had to install the 915resolution package to get beyond 1024x768 (which looks horrible on a widescreen, as you might imagine). Why couldn't Dell pre-install this on the machines that need it (integrated graphics)?
Browsing with Firefox, emailing with Thunderbird, and the media keys working with Amarok are some of the niceties that make me think this was the best bang-for-your-buck computer purchase I ever made.
:q!
I just recently started a page linking to linux laptop vendors. Check it out, and if you have anything to contribute, feel free to reply to this post.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.