Slashdot Mirror
Asus Budget Ultraportable Notebook Sold Sans OS
EconolineCrush writes "Tired of paying the Windows tax on notebooks? Asus's Eee PC 1201T budget ultraportable comes without a traditional operating system and sells for only $380. The 12-inch system has promising specifications, sporting an Athlon Neo processor, Radeon HD 3200 graphics, Bluetooth, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. It weighs just 3.2lbs with a 6-cell battery and can even handle light gaming duties. However, battery life in Ubuntu is considerably shorter than it is under Windows. Are there any better options for would-be laptop Linux users?"
Didn't they sell for less than that WITH an OS a year ago? Does "netbook" not mean what I think it means (cheap, low power, long battery life, not a desktop replacement)?
What does that even mean?
It Also Comes Sans Serif.
Yes, I have a large budget for my anus. But is that any of your business? I think not.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How well does that built in micro OS really work? Seems like for a lot of folks that might be all the "OS" they really need.
Fuck you for even bringing up the fucking iPad.
Netbooks are passe now that we have iPads. PCs are passe now that we have iPads.
Actually creating something is passe now that we have iPad. Go and consume, consume, consume.
It Also Comes Sans Serif.
But it does not come sans deputy.
nt
Darn, my last mod point just went away! Someone up him with informative, please!
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
support more than 2GB of RAM? Add any OS and the memory hungry Firefox and I'm already out of available RAM and the netbook is performing like crap.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My ancestors didn't use NT, you insensitive clod!
Consumers will finally be able to install what every Linux distro desired in order to write code, inexpensively.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic.
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 am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I don't understand why there are no laptops with a small power supply and (barely..) no battery.
95% of my laptop work is close to a socket and to a wifi internet connection. The trouble is that most laptops i used until now do not have a small power adapter. You still have to lug a considerabele power supply.
Battery is useful, but i could live without, and it would shave a small amount of the price and weight. And with a modularised design it could just be an other option.
Seriously. Why didn't they just dump something like vanilla ubuntu on the laptop? At least it would have something on it. If it's being sold without an OS, presumably it's being sold to someone who knows how to install. Even Asus' Splashtop would have been good.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
While I don't share your desire for an integrated power supply I can relate to someone who doesn't find current products that fit their needs (I'm the same way with cell phones and other items). I imagine the heat created is a big factor. You know how blisteringly hot those power bricks get? Stick that into the laptop case and all of a sudden you've doubled or tripled your cooling needs.
> 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!
More missing the point?
+----------------- | What is the question!
If lack of RAM is the problem, then install more RAM. I upgraded my Eee 901 to 2GB of RAM and that brought total cost up to $300. It allows me to use RAM for /tmp which makes it not nearly so sluggish. Firefox is still problematic. I think it does a lot of disk writes and that causes unacceptably long freezes on the Eee so I use Chromium (on Ubuntu.)
I don't do compiles and I certainly would not recommend it for a desktop or laptop replacement, but when I travel it meets my needs for browsing, email, loading podasts on my Sansa and occasional word processing and presentations.
Here in Thailand, or at least in Chiang Mai, most of the computers and laptops I've seen come with FreeDOS preinstalled. If you don't want to install an OS yourself (and don''t prefer Freedos ;) you can just leave the new computer to the shop and pick it up with a OS of your choice a few hours later for a dollar or two extra install fee + price of the OS.
. . . is not having to support an OS. I bet they start losing money as soon as the phone rings.
95% of my laptop work is close to a socket and to a wifi internet connection.
A lot of restaurants provide free Wi-Fi but don't have any customer-accessible power outlets. And not everybody requires the Internet all the time; some laptop users (such as myself) can get work done while commuting on a bus, train, or carpool.
Even Asus' Splashtop would have been good.
From the article:
The impression that I get from this Wikipedia article is that Splashtop and ExpressGate are one and the same.
My Eee PC 1005HA has a very small brick. It's a little wider and taller bigger than a Zone candy bar and about as long. It also has very long battery life. The only problem (as mentioned below) is that it gets really hot (~7 Amps), probably because of the small surface area.
The government can't save you.
some netbooks had soldered in ram which prohibited simply upgrading it.
The original Dell mini 10 for example.
I just bought a used Thinkpad T42 for $150 and put Ubuntu on it. It has an actual screen, keyboard, wifi and 40gb hard drive. It even has a supported 3d card so I can do the whizzy 3d desktop thing.
There are lots of offloaded business class laptops out there that run Linux great. They're usually very well built and full of Intel parts, which have solid Linux drivers.
You know, other solution would be to install software which makes more efficient use of available resources...
One that hath name thou can not otter
But the fact that this is rarely the case for any Linux-based desktop system tells me why power-saving and other (usually audio) features don't work well.
Its interesting that most of the (few) brands that work well with a distro like Ubuntu off the shelf also tend to be companies that offer certain models with Linux pre-installed. They're not like Dell, who will design a prototype from available components, then go to the component OEMs and say "We're making 2 million of this new system, but some of your chips come with standard features we'd rather leave out or fudge in software... chop that stuff off your chips and drop your price if you want our business".
Of course, the Linux drivers tend to be written for the OEM originals with their standard features intact, not the funky special-request variations made by Dell, Acer, etc. for their budget models.
What this translates into is that Johnny is perplexed as to why Linux has poor "PC compatibility".
Someone (that means us) needs to start insisting on systems that were designed with Linux or preferably a popular landmark distro like Ubuntu in mind. And we need to stop setting our friends and colleagues up for failed experiments when handing them discs expecting they can just run it on their PCs; It reflects badly on our judgment as individuals and on free open source software in general.
Exactly.
Converting a certain number of watts from AC to DC generates a certain amount of heat, and you can only improve the thermal efficiency of the inverter to a certain degree, then it starts getting more expensive very fast.
The smaller they make the power supply that provides a given wattage, the more problems you're going to have cooling it due to a smaller surface from which to radiate the heat.
Making it internal would be a nightmare, because then all that heat would be contained inside the case when you are trying to use it on AC power.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
The article says they used Ubuntu, but doesn't say whether they're using regular desktop Ubuntu or the Netbook remix. They admit that they haven't optimized the kernel: it's entirely possible that battery life could be improved by recompiling the kernel with different flags or some equally esoteric maneuver. Of course normal users shouldn't have to optimize their kernels, but installing the netbook edition shouldn't be that esoteric. The article doesn't say if they did that or not, but if they had, I suspect that they would say so.
I haven't installed plain Ubuntu in a while, so I don't know if it offers to optimize for netbooks at install time. It would be nice if it did that.
KTHXBYE
Instead of big Linux e.g Ubuntu etc, try a smaller Linux such as Puppy, http://www.puppylinux.com/ Approximately 100MB and fast.
Nowadays, with cheap cellular access, you can have plenty good enough internet "while commuting on a bus, train, or carpool"...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I imagine the heat created is a big factor. You know how blisteringly hot those power bricks get? Stick that into the laptop case and all of a sudden you've doubled or tripled your cooling needs.
As someone who frequently gets them so hot that the fail-safes kick in - well:
This.
It unfortunately tries (unsuccessfully) to perform throttling based upon load rather than having discrete under/overclocking modes as the proprietary Catalyst driver does. The result of which is that the GPU always draws excessive amounts of power even when running off the battery. The only real solution at this point is to swap out the open source driver for the ATI proprietary one and then use the "aticonfig" utility to set the power state according to your need at the time. Other non-GPU optimizations can be done as well, however, the power wasting the GPU is doing with the xf86 drivers is an order of magnitude greater.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Laptops with (barely...) no battery were the norm for many years. Still are, actually.
And the size of that power supply is so because you want "speed", "big screen", etc.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I use the Atom 270/1GB version of HP's Netbooks on both UNR and standard Ubuntu desktop - sure not seeing your speed problem.
On it runs full engineering software (full cad system) in a Windows Virtual Machine in VirtualBox running in Ubuntu UNR. AND have firefox open in Ubuntu with several tabs. With a terminal open running ssh back to a home server.
If I need a bigger screen I just hook it up to a monitor and plug in a mouse/keyboard. Or the projector for presentations.
.
This is actually better than your usual juvenile AC drivel. Oh, for a mod point...
Not bad. You have promise.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I may have something similar, an eee 900a with 1Mb RAM and 4Gb ssd. The problem is that not only is 4Gb too small, but it's a very slow ssd, worse than any hard drive. I spend about $50 to replace it with a much faster 16Gb, and installed Ubuntu NBR. It's now quite reasonable for web surfing. Flash movies are slow, but watching video with mplayer or vlc, even full-screen, is fine. It's great for traveling, as it fits in a small shoe bag and gets 3-4 hours battery life.
I LOL'd... thanks. XD
The E-Machine:
64 Bit Windows Home Premium
15" 1366x768 Screen
Dual core 2.2 GHz Intel CPU
3 GB DDR 2 RAM
250 GB HDD
DVD Burner
Intel 4500M graphics
5-in-1 media card reader
eMachines Black 15.6" eME725-4520 Laptop PC with Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor & Windows 7 Home Premium
The Asus 12 inch Intel-Ion netbook with Win 7 Home Premium is $470 with a one year warranty. ASUS Silver 12.1" Eee PC 1201N-PU17-SL Netbook PC with Intel Atom N330 Processor & Windows 7 Home Premium
#32270736! You are mistaken. I have long since forgotten my password, and don't care to rediscover it.
Love,
#32269826
Back to the topic...
Give Peppermint OS a try.
http://peppermintos.com/
Built for Speed
Peppermint OS was designed to be easy on your processor and system resources so you can get going and get things done...
Lightweight
Peppermint OS is under 512MB and easy to run as a Live CD or USB. Loads and Shuts down in Seconds...
User Friendly
Step-by-step installation, Works out of the box, Easy to Navigate with Automatic Updates....
Peppermint was designed for enhanced mobility, efficiency and ease of use. While other operating systems are taking 10 minutes to load, you are already connected, communicating and getting things done. And, unlike other operating systems, Peppermint is ready to use out of the box. Why spend hours tinkering and tweaking? Install Peppermint and get going !!
...pay the Linux Time tax later. Trust me, the Windows tax is cheaper.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
if it doesn't have an OS, how do I denigrate its existence?
signed, /.
Smaller size(volume) does not necessarily mean a smaller surface area.
Halving the thickness of a normal power brick changes the area very little, and can be compensated by making it slightly wider.
cheap cellular access
I happen not to live in such a country. Instead, I live in the United States, where "3G" is how much one would have to spend over the course of four years for mobile broadband service at $60 per month, capped at 5 GB per month. (Right now, my Virgin Mobile phone bill is $80 per year.) Business managers can justify the expense, but I can't, especially when I have to pay another $60 per month for cable Internet at home.
Actually you can get a used ultraportable from the CoreDuo generation for same price.
A bit bigger, a lot more powerful and a real keyboard to boot.
IBM X60 series used or Dell D4XX series = same price as cheap netbook
upgrade to 2Gb + 320Gb HDD = same as expensive netbook but full size kb, screen can go higher than 1024x600 (even 1024x768 is a vast improvement considering how most websites are formatted), decent processor in return for less portability.
I went down this road and am much happier with my X60s than my earlier period with a dell mini 9. You have to optimize the heck out of whatever OS/build you do on netbook (in fact, funnily I found hackintosh build to be 'snappiest') on an atom. However with my X60s (CULV CoreDuo) stock XP, ubuntu, Win7 all fly along nicely. And its still way more portable than say my work 15.4' machine.
http://www1.ca.dell.com/ca/en/home/Laptops/laptop-inspiron-1545/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-inspiron-1545&s=dhs&cs=cadhs1&ref=lthp
Not sure why you wouldn't get an Inspiron 1545. Full XP Driver support, runs Ubuntu or Fedora, or heaven forbid, comes with Windows 7.
4GB ram, 2.2Ghz dual core, and a 320GB drive for $500, and the 15.6" screen is a WHITE LED backlight.
The features and prices of that model have been increasing since January 2009, while the price has been the same or lower. Go Dell!
I've tried a few flavors of linux on my netbook, and so far the best performer has been mandriva running xfce4. Great power consumption, firefox runs pretty well (some slowdowns with video frames), but most flash sites run just fine. With NoScript and adblock I can do just about anything I need to. Although to be honest, I find my smartphone encroaching on the featureset I used my netbook fore these days.
Q.E.D.
does that mean that it could both suck and blow?
The article linked showed battery life using different models of the Eee. Maybe I'm blind, but I did not see ANY listings of battery life under different OS. I know that UNR 9.10 does not get the battery life of ASUS' remix of Gentoo that came with my Eee 901, but the added functionality is more than worth it. I would assume the bloat of Windows 7 would also eat more juice -- or be handicapped, the way the version of XP that came with some 701 and 901s was. I will be upgrading my Eee soon to UNE 10.04 (Ubuntu changed the name, from Remix to Edition).
Hi, I've run Knoppix off of a DVD on a laptop with Windows 2K and it had better battery life.
Which is why the battery life sucks on Ubuntu.
Of course noone will ever read my post, and the misinformed battery life benchmark will stick to this otherwise superb netbook (the Radeon 3200 is millions times superior to Intel IGPs).
In java/C/php not equal is expressed as !=
In Visual basic you might say "not equal to"
In SQL you would use <>
=/= seems to be popular these days. Programming hasn't been a major function of my career for about 5 years so I am a little out of the loop. What language uses =/= to mean not equal?
I have a gateway netbook with an Athlon 64 L110 (1.2GHz Athlon 64) and R690M chipset, and Gateway thoughtfully disabled AMD-V in the BIOS and gave me no option to enable it, so I can't use vmware, virtualbox, et cetera. The bastards suggested I pay for support in order to beg for an updated BIOS. Does this machine come with AMD-V enabled? I hope to replace my BIOS with Coreboot one day, my chipset and processor family are supported...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's a fork of ubuntu that is built for low energy consumption. LXDE desktop helps keep power drain down. It works great on my Lenovo Z61m. Unlike other linux distros, I had no trouble getting it to work beyond a couple minor tweaks.
I have an Asus EEEPC 2G Surf--you really can't get lower end on a netbook than this one. I use it regularly for IRC, Web, and programming projects and while, yes, it is sluggish, the key is to go for a minimal Debian install and work your way up from there. Forget about GNOME or KDE, if you're looking for a desktop experience, then you're looking at the wrong place.
As old and outdated as this computer is, is more than beats the user experience of an iPad since I can comfortably rest it on my lap in the lazyboy and tilt the screen up while using it :)
She's gone from suck to blow.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Actually, I just had to deal with a notebook where the exact opposite was true - Toshiba Satellite A40.
It's an old Celeron laptop. ACPI in Windows XP is broken for it - no fan speed control, and the system takes the temperature from the wrong sensor, so it thinks it's overheating when in reality it's running at 40C.
What's it do when it overheats? Throttles back to about 10% speed. Slower than a 266mhz PII. :P
The irony is of course... it works great with Linux!
The battery life is shorter because there isn't power management for the radeon driver in the Linux kernel yet.
The first drm merge request for the next Linux kernel contains code which begins to address this.
Asus probably threw together the most inexpensive modern components they could find while assuming there was a good chance they could eventually retail the machine with Linux on it.
Unfortunately, Asus probably weren't aware of ATI's commitment to open source or therefore their lack of and decided that pre-installing Windows was a tax unsuitable for a budget machine.
Depending on your view point, it only means that you either pay more than an OEM license for Windows by buying the retail version of Windows 7 for the machine or install any flavour of Linux and be patient over the next year waiting for the kernel updates to the radeon drm code in the Linux kernel.
Put Xen Desktop on your big honking Linux desktop and remote access it for 10 hours at a time using Citrix Receiver on iPad.
And yet, it still comes with a Windows key. Even Apples don't have Apple keys any more!
> I don't understand why there are no laptops with a small power supply and (barely..) no battery.
I wondered this too: and whenever I pack my eeePC I think about leaving the battery module at home, to save weight. But I always take it anyway, just in case.
I guess one answer is to pickup a cheap, 2nd hand laptop (cheap because the battery is dud). Ripout the power cells to save weight, although it will not make it smaller, just lighter. (Maybe a clever case-modder could turn the space into a pens and earbuds storage !)
Simple solution: Use Opera.
I do (on an EEE900A) and it was very much usable even before I installed a faster SSD and more RAM. Now I barely notice a difference to my dekstop (Flash videos excluded).
how do a laptop running on rechargeable AA's sound?
http://www.norhtec.com/products/gecko/index.html
the charger is right there in the computer.
iirc, they are also working on a computer in a keyboard. Basically a setup much like the C64 or amiga 500.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
What is this "gooey" you speak of? -- posted using links
So Linux kernel is the OS after all just like computer science has proofed.
To run a compiler on Linux, you also need a runtime library and a shell of some sort. In the case of GCC, which is written in C, one most commonly uses glibc as the C runtime library and Bash with Coreutils as the shell, whereas most versions of Linux in embedded systems use the "uClinux" stack: either uClibc or Newlib as the C runtime library and BusyBox as the shell.
And you can run compiler on it even when using the ExpressGate.
Is there a web page about a TCC, GCC, or Clang package to run on Splashtop aka ExpressGate?
But who would tell that to GNU and get killed because there is no such thing as GNU/Linux OS?
GNU/Linux is a combination of Linux, glibc, and Bash with Coreutils, used by the vast majority of desktop and server Linux systems. I have been using the term to mean "Linux that's not for an embedded system".
It can sort out those vacation photos and movies and better accomodate posting flammage on Slashdot.
The iPad will probably be left home. The netbook is still coming along. So is the Archos.
Sometimes a castrated machine is just castrated...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Of course this ACPI stuff is yesterdays' FUD. Of course like always, the trolls
are stuck in the past and one step behind. It's not the question of ACPI support
that I would focus on with this machine. The more interesting question is whether
or not the GPU has any h264 support and if that applies to Flash as well.
What do you think is going to be overwhelming a netbook CPU anyways?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Hmmmm.... I bought a compaq 386 laptop a long, long, time ago without an OS. How is this news?
That computer takes 8 AAs. I have a camera that takes 8 AAs and I've learned the hard way - that many batteries weighs a lot. I use lithiums just because they're lighter.
No, what I want is a TRS 80 Model 100 with 8 gigs of internal flash, legacy ports replaced by 2 or 3 USB ports, and a text-based Linux distro like INX.
An ethernet port would be required; 802.11x would be optional but nice. Since the only thing I used my M100 for was writing, it's incredibly important that this fantasy machine have exactly the wonderful mechanical feel of the old M100. That thing was an unalloyed joy to type on. And since this is a writer's tool, exclusively, I could even forgo INX as long as I have a file system and VIM.
Seriously, if there were someone out there modding old M100s to these specs by ripping out and replacing the guts while maintaining the form factor and wonderful keyboard mechanicals, I'd buy it in a heartbeat for USD$500. I'd consider paying USD$1000.
"aren't"
I have been a little surprised to see the price on a computer go up. I blame it mostly on the big computer manufactures getting into the game and not being able to make a profit on a machine that asus/msi/etc are willing to sell for just a few dollars profit. The key is just to ignore the name brand netbook manufactures, I picked up a MSI L1350, running win7 starter this weekend with a cheezy inkjet for $200 (frys). The "no-name" ones regularly go on sale for less than $230.
Of course flash movies are slow with 1MB RAM!
well, it can also use custom lithium packs, tho i am unsure how that will effect the weight. Heck, it maybe able to run of the wall socket without batteries inserted for all i know.
now that TRS you linked to made me think of this:
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=wxnpgpW4BIy2IJoX
the asus eeekeyboard. But the charger there seems to be the same that they are using for the eeepc series of netbooks. Not the biggest i have seen, but still a brick to carry around.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I've seen Asus page before. It's intriguing, but it's not portable. There's no display. If there were a way to use that touch screen as a display, it would still be awkwardly sized and the keyboard looks to be anything but the writer's joy that the M100 was.
As an alternative to the M100, there are low-end computers aimed at the educational and writer's market such as the Dana. However, I've had a chance to hold a Dana and some competing models. None of them have the "Damn, this is so perfect!" feel to their keyboard as the M100. That thing was special.
Of course, all this talk of tactile interfaces is really subjective. I learned to type during the switchover from manuals to electrics in my high school typing class. So the "mechanicalness" of the M100 just feels perfect to me in a way that few other devices (a particular model of Panasonic electric typewriter comes to mind) possibly can. No matter how much I long for that sort of device, I doubt I'll ever have one. I should probably get a Dana and see if I can adapt.
What bugs me is that I know such a thing as an updated M100 is possible. There's a market for the Happy Hacking keyboard, right? So how hard would it be to graft an 8-line monochrome LCD display on top of that? If somebody does it, I'll buy it.
iirc, it can act as a display, as the UI shown on it is basically a windows program.
but yes, it may have been more useful if it was a strip across the top, like say the logitech G15:
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/gaming/mice_keyboard_combos/devices/3498
to bad samsung never exported this:
http://www.umpcportal.com/products/Samsung/SPH-P9200
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Anyone want to speculate why NewEgg is hiding the prices for the ones with Windows?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=EEE+1201&x=0&y=0
The polite thing would be to say that it's simply because it's "high". At least they aren't doing the reverse and hiding the price of the no-OS one.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
while I am indeed used recently to the concept of prepaid 4 GB for ~$15 recharge, valid two months
I was in a Best Buy store yesterday, and I checked on this. It turns out that Virgin Mobile offers 1 GB for $40 or 5 GB for $60, valid one month.
Plenty good enough internet "while commuting on a bus, train, or carpool" isn't that painful on the amount of data transferred.
Until your operating system's automatic update manager notices that there is an Internet connection and proceeds to helpfully start background-downloading all 250 MB of the next service pack. Or are the update managers in Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6, and Ubuntu 10.04 flexible enough that the user can block update downloads over specific network interfaces or specific WLAN SSIDs?