(no subject)

[sebastienne]

A man came into the library an hour or so ago with a shiny new ASUS Eeepc, bought in Toys R Us for £219.

I am still salivating now. It was so beautiful! Like I imagined my perfect piece of tech and it just popped into existence. Such a perfectly crafted OS with a 15-second boot time and swift-opening open-source programs. He has promised to report back how it fares with the internet, but I'm assuming well.

I am going to be purchasing one of these Very Soon Indeed unless someone can give me a good reason why I shouldn't.

So, yes, I'm working on a Saturday. With a case of friend-of-a-friend head lice that is nevertheless near enough that I'm going to be attacking my head with chemicals and boiling my lovely satin bedlinen, just in case. The combined power of British Gas, the landlady, and her workmen, are unable to fix our heating, and I woke up in a frigid room despite having had a costly electric heater on all night. But I'm still over the fscking moon! £219!

Comments

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

On cold bedroom - we don't bother heating ours, being only in it in bed, and I'd be surprised if it was warmer than yours. Getting a wheat bag (they sell them in Boswells, it's a thingy you microwave) is a lot more effective than an electric heater, cause it's in the bed with you, on the right side of all that insulating duvet.

And I'd have thought satin sheets were freezing - do you have any cotton ones while we're in this cold snap?

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Or an electric blanket, yeah. Leaving the heater on all night is probably ineffective - turn it on before you want to get out of bed, certainly, but once you're in the bed it's mostly moot.

(I remember having just this problem in February when the heater went...)

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

which variant is that price though?

But, yay! Finally that bit of Windows code the courts made microsoft open has paid off, and xp compatible Linux is born, I've been waiting a long time to see those words on a machine spec.
Win.

[sir-rosealot.livejournal.com]

Nick's got one, but changed the OS to Xubuntu because the one it comes with allows you to operate as root without requesting a password, which seemed a bit risky.

[vass]

Someone else on my friendslist just got one, and she's really happy. She says it's very very light and comfortable to use.

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of this before - it looks great. Now I really want one too!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Or, if you lack a microwave, a good old hot water bottle works remarkably well.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

I don't understand what you mean there. The use of linux on the Eee has nothing to do with any posting of Windows source code. The 'compatible with Windows XP' simply means that one can install XP if one wishes - it's simply to do with the hardware being compatible.

[stronglight.livejournal.com]

Oh no! You have just spent my this months wages for me by telling me such a thing exists... Want. Just... WANT.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

My flatmate just got one of those this morning :-) It looks lovely, and we're happily watching YouTube videos on it over wifi right now. Setup was so easy we actually got it running by accident - everything's installed out of the box.

From what I can see, they don't come with any development or hacking tools, which would be a bit of a downer for me, so I'd probably install some flavour of Ubuntu over the top (shoulda gone for the OLPC buy-one-give-one while it was open, and damn the costs of shipping it from the US). But they look way shiny :-)

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Yes, they keep their heat longer than wheat bags. But they're slightly more faff, and mine has died of rubber fatigue.

Maybe a new one of those is what I want for christmas.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

Am posting on one now. Have been thoroughly impressed with it so far, although I stripped the installed version of Xandros off and put on a variant of Xubuntu - various reasons, including the one sir_rosealot posted above, but also the fact that the file system on the Xandros holds a back-up of everything, so you end up using more space, and you can't remove programs you don't want to free up space without hacking it.

The machine itself is lovely, though. If you're looking for somewhere to get one, I'd recommend checking the fora at www.eeeuser.com, as they're rather in short supply at the moment.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

That price is the 4G 701 model.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

So no different from a Dell laptop then, on which you can install either?

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

The ones with linux on? No, no difference that I can see in terms of os compatibility. I mean, you can install either on just about any laptop...

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

CAN you? We're just about to replace our nicked laptop, and Duncan says that Dell are the only ones where you can be sure all the hardware will work (no very new graphics cards etc). I'd prefer something smaller and lighter tbh.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

So it's not along the lines of Linux XP then?

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

Utter nonsense, Dell use more proprietory parts than most other manufacturers, just check what's in the box, it's not hard.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

Well, you can install it on pretty much anything, though you have no guarantee that everything will work. My laptop runs linux fine, though I have to use ndiswrapper to get the wireless working. http://www.linux-laptop.net/ has people's reports on installing linux on various machines.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

(Had to go and look that up to work out what it is.)

No, the os is just a customised version of Xandros, which is itself a fork of Debian.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my flatmate had to pay a bit more and get his imported from the Far East.

Does it come with any dev tools? I tend to think that anything without at least one programming language isn't worthy of being called a computer...

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

Well, you can get shell scripts working on it, so it comes with more dev tools than your standard Windows machine. Asus are planning to release the tools they used to develop the software specifically for it, and it's possible to enable Debian repositories on it and then get anything in there working. If you really wanted to do development on it, though, I'd suggest taking the default install off as I've done...