I unexpectedly acquired an Asus EeePC 900 last weekend. Lovely piece of hardware.
The Xandros distro was okay at first (IceWM brought me fond memories of the year 2000, when I used it). Then I started longing for Firefox 3 and the aesthetics of GNOME applications. Finally, when apt-cache search told me there was no SSH server package available, I gave up and installed Ubuntu Eee from a SD card. The software selection is incomparable (Asus/Xandros: 870 packages available, according to apt-cache stats. Ubuntu: over 30,000 packages.) Also, yay rotating cube desktop!
Things I like about the Eee:
Small! Lightweight! Beautiful white colour! Small pixels are pretty! 1024x600 at 8.9" is 133 dpi. Not quite the 225 dpi of a Nokia N810, but nicer than the 100 dpi of my T61W or the 85 dpi of my 19" external LCD. The keyboard is much better than I expected. I hate those laptops that squeeze Home/End/PgUp/PgDn in an extra column on the right. Asus didn't. Web browsing is much more pleasant than on a N810. It's faster for AJAXy sites such as Google Reader. Also, Firefox 3. Video watching is much more pleasant than on a N810: no need to convert anything.
Things that are bad:
It gets hot. Either the hardware is not power-efficient, or the software isn't doing a good job. Only 2 hours of battery life (plus an extra 40 minute safety warning with the blinking red battery low light). This is during normal usage (WiFi on, Compiz, Firefox, no CPU-intensive Flash plugins). No integrated Bluetooth. Therefore you have to lug a dongle around if you want to use GPRS/EDGE/3G when there are no WiFi access points around. I hate dongles. Doesn't come with Ubuntu preinstalled. Not all hardware works in Ubuntu:
Even after using the Eee version of Ubuntu I had to manually tweak config files and compile kernel modules to get volume hot keys working. No webcam or mic for me, though others report those working. Touchpad is not configurable and doesn't do wheel emulation on the right edge, although most other gestures work. Sound needs a module reload after suspend/resume, which causes an irritating error dialog from the volume control applet). Video playback sometimes shows a blank black screen until you move a window to overlap part of the picture. Firefox scrolling/redrawing under Compiz is noticeably slow sometimes (I don't know if it's because I enabled CPU frequency scaling, or if this is a problem with the Intel graphics driver problem.). When I unplug a Bluetooth USB dongle, a btdelconn process starts eating 100% CPU time in the kernel and cannot be killed. Did I mention my hate for dongles?
My workhorse, a 14" Lenovo T61W, now seems huge by comparison:
I'm not going to stop using my N810 (which fits in a pocket, has a much longer battery life, and is more convenient for e-books or NumptyPhysics). I'll stop lugging my T61W around instead and start leaving it at work. The EeePC is an almost-perfect travelling laptop.
The upcoming Asus EeePC 901 is going to fix the lack of internal Bluetooth and the battery life. I wonder when it will become available in Lithuania. (The 900 is displayed in almost every electronics shop here. Yay Asus. Boo Nokia for not doing this with its Internet Tablets.)
