Asus Eee Update

I've been using the Asus Eee PC for a few weeks now, and I have to say my overall impression is very favorable indeed. It's very portable (small and light), has reasonable battery life, a very fast boot time (and fast shutdown as well - ever needed to head to the airport while Microsoft wasted your time shutting down XP by installing updates?), and overall easy manageability. Now, of course, this is LINUX, and you'd better be comfortable using the command line (terminal window) interface from time to time. LINUX still needs a shell that incorporates all of those cool little commands, but the Eee is regardless a good start and, like Ubuntu, which I also really like, an indication that we may all indeed be able to go LINUX on client devices over the next few years.

OK, I still have mixed feeling about LINUX - I mean, is UNIX the best we can do? Linus Torvalds does some kind of let's-clone-UNIX college project, releases the source, and the world goes ga-ga? The appeal is, however, obvious: it's an OS, it's portable, it's free, and it's going to be on everything from wireless sensors to consumer handhelds, notebooks, PCs, servers, and is already the supercomputer OS of choice. But, well, like I said, someone will write a great GUI shell someday and no one will care what the underlying code is.

My first task was to get the Eee working with the Motorola Q as a USB broadband modem. Accomplishing this on the PC took some real doing - download USB drivers, downloaded Verizon's VZAccess Manager client, calling Verizon support when it didn't work, etc. But I did eventually get it to work fine with XP. On the Eee, it was a matter of adding a new terminal connection, which took about one minute, and I was up and running just like that. No downloads, drivers, or calling anyone. I did it in an airport while waiting for a plane.

I've also been using OpenOffice, although not for anything mission-critical yet, and it has no problem opening Office 2003 documents. Microsoft once again changed not just the user interface (irritating enough all by itself) on Office 2007, but also, once again, the file formats, for no other reason, I believe, than to hinder us in using an Office alternative - especially a free one like OpenOffice. Their shameful behavior will come back to bite them eventually when we've all had enough of this nonsense. As you know, I have already.

I have had a couple of stability problems getting external monitors to work; this requires a bit more investigation. There's an issue with partial SAMBA support that seems to prevent saving to a server; I'm also investigating that as well. Now that I've gotten used to the relatively small keyboard, which is still much better than the two-thumbs PDA keyboards, I'm very pleased overall.  The form factor, functionality, and astonishingly low price all add up to a major winner here, and I still highly recommend the Eee to anyone looking for an Internet-tablet type of device. There is a newer model (the 900) with a larger screen coming out; I'm likely going to upgrade to this shortly. But wait - have you seen the HP 2133? It may very well be that this class of tiny PCs will become mainstream pretty quickly. And it is quite possible that I will be able to dump my Windows notebook this year.

And you can even (illegally, of course; I'm not advocating this) install Mac OS X on your Eee.