Slashdot Mirror
Just What is this ASUS Eee Thing Anyway?
davidmwilliams writes "ASUS have released a cheap subnotebook. It is far from state-of-the-art tech-wise, with 512Mb RAM and a Celeron processor. It has a 4Gb hard drive and no optical drive. Its screen is 7" and runs at the odd resolution of 800x480 and the operating system looks like something Fisher Price might have designed. Why would you buy it? What on earth can you do with this?" I've been wondering this myself given the huge coverage in the media of this thing.
I've been wondering this myself given the huge coverage in the media of this thing. Well, you posted an article about the source for it violating the GPL (a fixed shortly thereafter). You might have learned something about it then. Or you could do a quick search on your site for it and you'd turn up the first review you posted and we discussed.
Believe it or not, the "huge media coverage" that I've noticed of this thing has only been on Slashdot. Other than that, it's a big name manufacturer, in our world it's huge news. It has a 4Gb hard drive and no optical drive. Its screen is 7" and runs at the odd resolution of 800x480 and the operating system looks like something Fisher Price might have designed. Why would you buy it? What on earth can you do with this? That's not solid logic when you're speaking to a crowd that busts its ass trying to get Linux running on their microwave. I didn't see the reviewer giving any real specific applications of the laptop. Back in college, I used to work with pioneer robots in my classes. The damned things had a 15 lb. Dell notebook mounted on top of them. Ridiculous. Try hauling the robot and the laptop to a demonstration or presentation.
My work here is dung.
Like any sub-notebook, you put it in your man-bag/briefcase, and then carry it about with you at all times, so you always have a computer on you.
Spent 40 bucks on a 2gb ram upgrade, chucked on an nLited winXp. Now I've got a little utility machine that's /REALLY/ tiny and cute, and didn't cost the earth. /bit/ of a pain, and just a smidgeon more screen space would have been great, but it works for what it does.
Keeping it light, in both weight and bootup times means it's a great companion to my main dev laptop (Dell M something) that takes an age till it's usuable with all the dev tools/sql servers it loads up. It barely takes up anymore room in my laptop bag, so if I need to check something quick, that comes out, boots in 30 seconds and is good to go on a wireless connection rather than dragging out my main machine.
I love it. Screen is a
Tempted to get a white one for the kitchen area, just to have vids playing whilst at the breakfast bar, music playing whilst cooking, or whatever.
9.5/10
Waiting for an amusing sig.
I personally have a PepperPad 3 that I use while travelling. It came down to weight and the apps available (such as OO.org, Thunderbird/Sunbird, etc.).
I do a lot of travelling and lugging a 6 pound laptop w/accessories through airports sucks. With a fully functional Linux distro on my PP3, I can now use a much smaller messenger bag, and everything, including full-sized external keyboard and mouse, weighs in at less than 3 pounds. And it does everything I need it to while travelling.
There are at least two hardware modifications aka moddings for the ASUS Eee PC mentioned at Repair4Laptop. One explains how to add an internal USB Bluetooth port to the sub-notebook without affecting the built-in wireless or using the empty mini PCIe card slot. The other describes how to install an internal 3G Card.
It's hard to type on if you're used to regular sized keyboards, but it gets the job done. Three hours of battery life isn't that great considering the OLPC gets about 12, and better protected from the environment too. ftfa: "It's endless world of hardware modifications that smart people worldwide have embraced" Um.. what the hell is that supposed to mean?
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The Eee PC uses unionfs to merge together two partitions: sda1 (/mnt-system, 2.3GB, read-only) and sda2 (/mnt-user, 1.4GB, read-write)
There is a grub boot option "Restore Factory Settings" which wipes the user part.
Deleting installed applications doesn't free up any space - it just marks them as deleted on the user partition.
Seems to me I remember the day when a 640K operating system and a 40Meg disk were king, so having 1.5 Gig left over to play with after the OS is loaded --that's like luxury space. Oh, and I can go back and get more permanent memory if I delete some stuff if won't ever use, can add and subtract multiple versions of multi-gigabyte portable (SD) memory, and if I use a USB Wifi stick, I can connect even to the web at pretty good speed?
What this thing is is portable. Medium powered. Flexible. Ideal for a Linux person like me who would like to have a road warrior unit he can live with -- without the backache.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I think Mr. Williams needs a better thesaurus. From page 2:
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Having actually used one, I can say, it rocks. Ok so I wouldn't like to use it as a main machine (not what it was designed for) but if you are an avid note taker, or like to have internet on the run it is all you could want. It is *exceptionally* light, even compared to the JVC mini note range that I look after every day.
Also, its pretty much instant on. So your not hanging round for things to happen. It's ideal to check mail, a few letters whilst in the wifi coffee shop. Its an ideal meeting toy I suppose.
Also a massive advantage of this for linux is that a) A linux company is getting paid to put an OS on hardware and secondly, the hardware and software fit well together, they were designed too.
As for the interface, hell its good. It's simple and quick. What more could you need. If you want more advanced options, turn on the advanced options, its not hard.
The really mad thing? It's not linux peeps buying it, its average shoppers and gadget freaks. Its providing an inroad to the masses that standard linux cannot because of the variety of hardware it must work on.
Put another way, in the uk, you cannot buy one for love nor money at the moment, and probably not until mid April will there be sufficient stocks.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
Funny that you would refer to the interface as Fisher Price looking but the reality is for a lot of techies that buy it is that it is an inexpensive / mod-able toy that may eventually find some good use. After all why risk messing up your high end laptop / desktop unit when you can get a device that is designed to be messed around with and is inexpensive in case you do manage to break it. Just look at the Linksys NSLU2 for example. As a product it's nearly completely useless as a NAS. Load on the modified firmware that lets you run Debian on it thou or OpenSlug and presto, you have a Linux server that has a 4 watt power use profile that's pretty hard to beat for price too.
Why the Eee? I reviewed one for the local alt-monthly newspaper, and even after I was done with the review, I wound up keeping it. In a nutshell: it's nifty to have an inexpensive, super light, teeny wifi laptop with a crisp, bright screen -- I've been using it primarily for a RSS/CBR reader myself. My advice is ditch the standard OS, which is lovely but would never fully satisfy most slashdot readers and install Ubuntu 7.10. It's easy enough to do and works great after a few tweaks. One caveat to keep in mind is that I can't seem to find any place that sells additional power adapters (yet) so the portability is slightly diminished by having to lug around the adapter too. but I'm sure that will be rectified soon, as Asus has done a great job so far responding to customer complaints and suggestions.
An attractive feature of the eee is that its bios makes it possible to boot from anything, the internal ssd, an sd card or any storage devices connected to the three USB ports.
I dont like loose appendices but the SD card slot is very good, I purchased four 16GB Patriot SDHC cards, and installed four different operating systems on each of them. True, I spent more on these cards than on the eee itself, but I have a functionality regular laptops do not have. My favorite is Ubuntu 7.10 with lots of physics and biology apps (5.4GB used for installation). I also hacked a Win XP disk and managed to put XP on another SD card, but it is slower than linux. The interesting part is that I do not use the internal SSD for booting anything, just for storage.I HATE Xandros, the first thing I did was to erase it.
Since another article claimed we had forgotten about it, Google Trends claims the eee have surpassed ThinkPad, and close to but not still on par with MacBook. If we look at Google News instead, the advantage over ThinkPad is even greater, and even "asus eee" has have more than three times the number of hits than ThinkPad, and half the hits of the MacBook.
I'd consider a position between two of the most recognized brands pretty good.
On the other hands, if we were to believe Internet statistics, Ron Paul would be elected president with the greatest margin in the history of the country.
I find it hilarious that the author says "the OS looks like something Fisher Price might have designed." It's sort of an (un)concious jab at Linux.
Here's something I noticed for years:
Do me a huge favor. Go to an XP machine. Go to control panel, look at the icon for "User Accounts".
Look familiar?
FLR
My boss plonked TWO of these bloody things on my desk just before Christmas, with a look of beaming pride on her face - one of them came in pink, y'see.
"Look! It comes in pink! It's so SMALL and CUTE! Aren't they cool? Are they any good? I bought two of them..."
She's now pestering me to buy one for every mobile user because their (dual-core, 2 GB, 7200 RPM, DVD-R, 1600x1280 Latitude D830) laptops are "too heavy". Except she doesn't like the operating system and wants XP on them all. I'm now in the process of tactfully telling her that this is not going to happen... it'd be worse than the f***ing Blackberries they keep buying and expecting us to fix.
"If he were a plant, people would roll him up and smoke him."
Precisely, if Lenovo came out with some sort of new thing the thinkpad brand would likely skyrocket for a little while too.
My real question is: what can I do with this that I cannot do with a $250 used thinkpad, a can of air, and a new battery? Thinkpad is cheaper, has a better everything, and I can actually type on it without shrinking my hands. I guess this eee is a lot smaller and doesn't smell like cabbage yet.
Love the idea of this computer, but the cheapskates have always had the refuge of obsolete computers.
I've had one of these for nearly two months now. It runs Ubuntu Gutsy just fine, with all your favourite apps. I'm typing this comment on it, in fact.
It has everything a laptop should (except a CDROM), and plays music, browses the web, runs OpenOffice, etc. It's not helpful to think of it as a "cut-down" or "toy" machine. It's really a pretty standard PC. It generally feels very fast and responsive, perhaps because all the storage is solid state.
It even runs Compiz-fusion flawlessly.
I've been using it over the last couple off weeks as my main machine. My only complaint is that the screen res is low and up-arrow key and right-shift key are too close together, and they have a similar symbol on them.
At a hospital I consult with; the IT penetration is surprisingly very poor among doctors. The hospital typically receives 600 patients a day; of which about 275 are diabetics - who require repeated visits over years. There are about 150 in-patients who typically stay for 4.5 days before discharge.
IT usage is about 60% for the in-patients; but less than 12% for out-patients. The problem? Doctors are fed up with using PCs - Windows or Linux. Some of their biggest complaints:
1. Long boot time; Linux is only slightly better here; and Vista is downright pathetic and consequently been banned. The EEE PC boots up in less than 20 seconds and the GUI is immediately functional. No need for any useless login, active desktop, active directory etc.
2. Ultra portable - so the doctor can carry it to the wards and rooms; and dictate into it when necessary. Very cumbersome with laptops; tablets are better; but very expensive compared to the EEE (1:8).
3. Wakes up from suspend in less than 2 seconds - unparalleled.
4. The interface is very user friendly and makes sense without training - unlike Windows.
Surprisingly, this is still not widely avbl in India. Ingram Micro is getting it in the 3rd week of Jan. as I hear. We are ordering about 120 units for our doctors; who are genuinely thrilled with a computer for the first time in their lives.
****
A second appln. is for an e-governance system whereby citizens apply for assistance - there are about a dozen welfare schems like for handicapped, destitutes, old age pension, widow pension etc. The EEE PC is much more functional than a laptop and can be easily carried to the villages by trained self-help-group women assistants. The e-governance appln. is a web-enabled semi-offline-capable system; so even if there is no broadband; the locally installed LAMP appln. gives a very similar look-and-feel; once in a few days it gets synced with the main server.
Being about 25% of the price and weight of a laptop makes the EEE PC very handy for both these situations.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I picked up a 4G surf model.
Can't speak for everyone, but mine is the laptop I actually USE on a regular basis. I'm hesitant to whip out my Toshiba R15 tablet, since it's heavy, and slow to boot. The EE is up in 30 seconds, and thanks to the SSD doesn't balk at being tossed around a bit.
I'll grab it on the way out of the house and just drag it with me like my camera. I've used it in conjunction with my cellphone to check mail on the road, research products, or do a quick wiki lookup when conversation requires. It's also pretty hand for doing photo previews in the field. The SD slot makes reading my casual camera's card easy.
With screen rotation, I can hold it vertically and read e-books and manga scanlations like I would with a paperback.
I've done some coding and remote work with it, but I wouldn't recommend it. Keyboard is way too small for that sort of thing.
About the only thing I haven't done on my EEE is gaming, which is clearly beyond the intent of the unit. That said, I'll bet it'd make a great classic game / emulator platform.
Now that's not to say I don't have my gripes. As I mentioned, the keyboard is just a tad too small. I've had to learn to type with six finger and a thumb. The right shift STILL stymies me 4 weeks after my purchase. There's no capslock indicator, which has caused me no end of trouble when entering passwords. Can't do a middle button emulation click with the rocker style mouse button.
But none of these are game enders. Annoyances yes, but given what ASUS is charging for this little beastie, I'm not expecting perfection. I'm expecting usable, with minor compromises, and that's exactly what I got. Really, the EEE was probably the most satisfying notebook purchase I've ever made.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
What can you do with a small portable computer that runs Linux? I doubt anyone here would have any ideas. Try a site like Fark or something. I think they're into computers.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
You know what guys? I have a Toshiba Portege 3010 that I bought at a flea market just for fun, it was so cute and weights in the region of 1 KG! Its a full-fledged windows PC with 266 mhz speed, 64 Mb ram, 5 GB harddrive and a USB port. This thing is 9-years-old. Did ya get that folks? NINE-YEARS-OLD. Guess what I did with it? Thanks to some russian genious Windows 98 got USB support for general-mass-storage on it so it worked like a charm with todays USB memory stick, another smart person out there in the internet world figured out how to use CF (compact-flash) WiFi devices on it...so I could just insert that one into a pcmcia-cf converter and voila...I had WiFi on it as well. Now...this thing surfs with the speed of any portable today (exept flash videos that do require some cpu power)...but it boots in 17 seconds (yes folks - 17 seconds from the second you turn it on). The point I am trying to make here..is that my TFT-screen based 10.2 Inch portable 1 kilo laptop from yesteryear...does this just as fine as this "modern" device from Asus... cmon guys...I am sure they can do better than that? Or are we really stuck in time somewhere?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I have one of these. The builtin linux is tweakable enough (like by adding standard debian 4.0 repos to the apt config) so you can install dwm - and from there, you have a very light device that boots into a terminal in under 15 seconds, and you can do everything you usually do "online" (irc and mail through ssh, music through nfs or netradio with moc, web with firefox, etc).
It's easily powerful enough to watch movies, play flash (youtube of course), some opengl games. The keyboard is also very good; if you do your coding through the unix interface (make etc) as you should, instead of some GUI BS, it's very usable for programming, too. (Of course, you should use the keyboard instead of a pointing device to do your stuff; but that's true for any computer, not just the EEE.)
Battery is strong enough to give you 3 hours of movie watching over NFS over wifi.
Negative points I could bring up: it gets warmer than my Lenovo 3000 V100 (although the Lenovo is supposed to be a markedly cool model), and the builtin fan (the single moving part) is audible at times. I can live with these problems - and the EEE makes a lovely modern replacement for my old Toshiba Libretto C100.
we discovered a new way to think.
Not only did they copy Windows 95's taskbar /start menu /system tray model, they did it in 1984. That's some f*ckin' nerve.
Anonymous parent is right - the Eee is 630 MHz. It is NOT 900 MHz, even though all the press articles and even some of the retailer descriptions say this. This was a major disappointment when I bought one.
And you have a 9 y/o hardware package, with a 9 y/o CPU (and the processing power to go with it.) You can enjoy the wonders of the battery life of a 9 y/o ultra-portable's power management. Don't even get me started on 9 y/o hard drives, or yellowed 9 y/o LCD screens. I'm not sure I'd wanna run even DSL on 64mb with that kinda speed, much less Xandros or any reasonably modern distro. (XP is completely out of the question.) I refurbed a bunch of 3010s for a non-profit I volunteer with. They didn't sell terribly well, even though we gave them a 1 year warranty!
But for the sake of argument, you've been able to make a workable unit out of the 3010. How much time, and effort did you have to expend? More to the point, do you really think Joe Average is going to be able to duplicate your efforts? Or will be willing to?
As for being stuck in time, bear in mind the cost of the 3010. You paid blood money to get one of these when they were new. The EEE is reasonable money for most folks, and practically pocket cash for the more well-heeled geeks. The magic is the combination of form-factor and price. This is the first time we've been able to get something this small, this cheaply.
That said, the OP should be commended for saving another machine from the scrap pile. Did you manage to score a unit with the port-replicator and intact keyboard? Those were the most common problems I ended up seeing.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
I'm waiting for the Pandora! http://pandora.bluwiki.com/
In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed as an Atheist.
So this story has been tagged "olpcbetter" but why? The olpc has 1GB flash while the eee has 2GB, 4GB or 8GB. The olpc has 256MB ram while the eee has either 512MB or 1GB. The olpc has a 433MHz Geode LX while the eee has a 630 - 900 MHz Celeron. The olpc is about 1.5kg while the eee is under 1kg. Finally the olpc is 242mm × 228mm × 32mm while the eee is 225mm x 164mm x 21.5mm~35 mm. So the eee is smaller, faster, lighter and has more memory (both ram and flash).
So just how is the olpc better? You might argue that the "dual-mode" screen, or the mesh mode networking and the external antenna, makes the olpc more appealing to you, but unless you are in the olpc target market I can't imagine many would really prefer the olpc over the eee?
The "flamebait" tag seems far more appropriate for this "story"!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Agree on everything except the battery. My x40 gets about 6 hours on the extended battery. I paid $400 for the laptop on e-bay a year ago, and it really outspecs the $400 4GB eee. Faster cpu, bluetooth, larger screen, 10x the storage, double the ram, and is built like a tank. Best of all, as one of the smallest ultraportables, it's only a teeny bit larger/heavier than the eee.
That's the reason for the coverage. To buy an equivalent size laptop from Dell, Sony, Toshiba etc. would probably cost you 3-5 times as much.
As an Eee PC owner I can say these devices are great. Some of the software is pretty irritating but I can live with the faults for the price and practicality. I used my laptop on a Ryanair cliptray yesterday. This is a feat barely possible or advisable with most laptops.
If you have to ask the last question (i.e. you cannot name at least five things you would do with it), then you geek license is revoked immediately. Have a nice day.
Heck, the thing can run Nethack. Do you need _more_ reasons to buy one ?
In true Microsoft fashion, the company "announced" Windows 1.0 in 1983, but couldn't sell it until 1985. In part, that was because they couldn't get it to work, but the other problem was that it was a derivative copy of Apple's Mac system, which had been in development since 1980, and therefore was held up until Microsoft could force Apple into licensing it the Mac OS UI in 1985.
As for the Apple 'bought' the OS from Xerox idea, consider: Apple's 1983 Lisa was a huge leap past anything delivered by Xerox and was about half the price of the Star machines Xerox half-assedly tried to sell in the early 80s. The Mac was another big leap over the Lisa in UI, although it greatly simplified the sophistication of the underlying OS in order to deliver an environment that could run on consumer-priced hardware in 1984. Apple clearly led UI development through the mid 80s, and nothing was even close. This was because it had invested + $60 million into UI and OS development.
On the cheap, Microsoft tried to offer a clone of the Mac environment running on far inferior IBM PC hardware - which had only ever been designed to run text-based DOS. Apple delivered highly customized hardware designed expressly to run a graphical environment. Even if Apple and Microsoft both had equal resources, getting a Mac-like GUI to run on a PC would have been impossibly more difficult. Apple was making money selling hardware, while giving away its software. Microsoft was only making money on software, so cutting corners and shipping an unfinished product was in Microsoft's best interests.
The market wasn't sophisticated enough to understand the difference between a custom OS running on purpose-built hardware and a kluge running on DOS running on crap PC hardware of the day. The tech press only reported that both had a pointer, mouse, and icons.
1985's Windows 1.0 wasn't sold until after John Sculley licensed Apple's technology to Microsoft (in exchange for 2 years of Excel on the Mac). That turned out to be a bad deal. The idea that Apple fell from the lead because it "didn't license its OS" is a bit of a mistake, because Apple did license it, it just did it in a really stupid fashion that lost control of its own technology.
Windows wasn't EVER pre-installed on a PC until 3.x arrived in 1990, SIX YEARS after the Mac arrived. PC hardware makers were all upset that they couldn't compete against Apple's Macs by selling dumb DOS PCs, so they pushed Microsoft to give them a rip off copy that could make their shoddy hardware look as good. Apple didn't market its machines, didn't retail them properly, and therefore couldn't handle the balloon of PC clones that appeared running a fake copy.
Still, nobody EVER claimed that Windows was even close to the Mac until the end of 1995, MORE than a FULL DECADE after the Mac arrived. Other companies actually delivered credible competition: Amiga shipped interesting hardware acceleration technology and OS improvements, but Jobs' NeXT really blew past the Mac back in 1988, YEARS before anyone really began using Windows.
NeXT's OS was far ahead of the Mac, and layered on additional sophistication in the UI. THREEE YEARS LATER, Microsoft announced it was going to deliver Cairo and match all the features in NeXTSTEP. Never did. Ended up pooping out a revision of Windows 3.x that copied lots of ideas from NeXT's UI FOUR YEARS LATER. It also delivered a "server/workstation" OS that was largely unusable throughout the 90s. I know, I was an NT admin through 2001. NT was famous for needing a reboot every few weeks to prevent a lockup. It was crap for SEVEN YEARS. These are LONG PERIODS OF TIME.
After owning the market with shitty products for well over a decade, Microsoft used its fabulous wealth to half-assedly squirt out minor updates to DOS/Windows and then released a usable version of NT in 2000, and a consumer version in 2001 with XP. SEVEN YEARS LATER they polished that but the market doesn't give a shit.
The state of the art is now being delivered by the same comp
With a large (8 cell) batery, the x40 is nearly double weight of the eee.