Lime and I decided to get ourselves a couple of Asus Eee PCs. The way the won is doing, the prices are comparable enough that we stopped hesitating, especially since Lime needs something for studying and I need someone I can haul to class or to my office. (I got tired of carrying my HP Pavilion laptop in one back, and the class stuff in the other; this way, it all goes into one shoulder bag.)
- Mine is green, Lime’s is white.
It took me a few hours to research how to install Ubuntu on it — someone’s remixed Ubuntu especially for it, and there are some scripts you can run to make it immediately functional, too — and then it was up and running. There are a few things I’d like to do to get the interface a little funkier, but the RAM (upgraded and all) just doesn’t seem up to it.
They came with Windows XP in Korean preloaded, which, of course, is of little interest to me: formatted the drive of mine completely and threw Ubuntu on. Lime, of course, will need access to Windows, so I’m going to set up a dual boot on hers as soon as I can. (For some reason, I can’t seem to get it to boot from the USB drive, though I’m getting closer.)
It’s really light, and really snazzy, and the only thing that I don’t like about it so far is the horrible right shift key on the keyboard. I figure I’ll probably remap it as soon as I get a chance, switching it with the up arrow on the keypad. There’s gotta be a way to do that in Ubuntu, if people can do it in Windows…
The Netbook Remix interface is really nice, a much more workable interface for the netbook than a plain old Desktop like the one in the preloaded Windows system. Mine looks vaguely like this for now:
though I’d like to trick it out to look more like this:
Anyway, I’m happy enough with it. It’s pretty usable, pretty light, it was a snap to get the OS working, and I only have a few more mods left to do. (The key remap, enabling Korean input, installing a few more programs, and some media stuff that wasn’t handled in the scripts.)
So anyway, I don’t know what the interface is like if you’re using the original Linux one available in the US, or Windows (as the ones in Korea seem to all have preloaded) but the version of Ubuntu that was remixed especially for this series, available here, is really working well as far as I’m concerned! Even the hard drive gives me plenty of space — 160 GB is, after all, bigger than the drive on my laptop. Tons of space for writing and other projects, which is good… next semester is going to involve a fair amount of multimedia stuff.
I could use a spare battery or two, though… the battery life is relatively long, but the day (and my usage time) seems to be somewhat longer…