My Free Netbook Arrived Today

Newegg.com had this deal going on last week: Buy a color laser and get a “free” Asus Eee 4G (701) netbook. Our Marketing manager was kind enough to ask me if that was something that I might be able to use… I assured him that I could probably find a purpose for it!

It showed up today and I’m still playing with it so this is not really a review. But I have some initial impressions that I thought I’d share.

First off, it really is tiny. No pictures or videos that I’ve seen really conveyed that to me. Like, the kind of tiny that makes me consider strapping it to my wrist as a wearable PC or some other such geeky thing.

That’s a picture of the Eee sitting on my primary work laptop. At that point I hadn’t even fired it up yet, I was just marveling at the size and weight. Granted, the big one sports a 17” panel as compared to the Eee’s 7” but I’m just about getting whiplash going back and forth between the two.

Speaking of the 7” panel… while it isn’t necessarily the size I would’ve chosen (I had been checking out the 9 and 10 inch models) I have to say that it isn’t as bad as I might’ve feared. The screen is crisp and the resolution is high enough  (for the size) that I’m generally doing OK with it. However, I may have found another reason to keep my reading glasses on my desk.

To continue with the “tiny” theme: The keyboard might kill me. I don’t know that I’ll ever truly adapt to touch typing on something this small. I seem to be evolving a compromise though. I touch type with the left hand and two fingered peck with the right. Sounds weird, but I can make pretty good speed that way. My hands are just too big to crowd both over this thing. Oh, and the keyboard seems a bit flimsy. I’m curious to see how it holds up to use over time.

I initially had some major problems getting and keeping a wifi connection. In fact, I was frustrated enough to prepare a stripped down XP Pro CD (courtesy of nLite) and try to install it. Alas, while the Eee BIOS “saw” the USB CD-ROM drive, it didn’t want to boot from it. Shortly after that, I got the Ethernet connection working and used the Software Update facility to update the wifi. Now everything works just fine.

The next challenge is to see if I can get my Sprint 3G USB stick to work (a Sierra Compass 597). I found a forum post that appears to have a good “recipe” so it looks like I’ll be recompiling the kernel soon. If that works, I’ll probably stick with the Linux OS. If not, I’ll give another run at installing XP on it.

About that Linux OS: While the interface is a bit “cartoony” I have to say that it’s nice and lightweight. This thing only has 512MB of ram but it performs very well with very minimal lag as programs start/close. If I end up putting XP on it I’ll need to upgrade it to 1GB for sure.

Most useful tip I’ve found so far? Ctrl-Alt-T to quickly get a terminal window up. From the command line it is nice and easy to add some more software. For instance, one of the first things I did was

sudo apt-get install tsclient

tsclient puts a nice GUI front end for remote desktop (rdesktop). Now I need to figure out how to add my own apps to the menu’ing thing.

So next up is the 3G card. If that works I’ll get Hamachi on here and I think I’ll have a nice lightweight “ops book”. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this thing soon. Down the road I’ll probably be exploring raising the base 512MB to a gig. Heck, I might even add another SD card for more storage (it currently sports the base 4GB solid state drive). Then again, most of what I need is “in the cloud” so I may not need much storage. Time will tell…

Possibly Related posts:

1. Netbook Linux Adventures
2. Follow-up to Netbook Linux Adventures
3. The Obligatory Eee Follow-up Post
4. USB Bootable Linux for the Eee Netbook
5. From Eee to Acer to Aspire to Easy Peasy Linux