Bagel Belly Blog

eeeeeeee! PC!

So, curious to see what all the fuss is about with netbooks, and fed up with carrying around a hefty collection of overweight laptops, I decided it was time to downsize to an Asus Eee PC. I picked one up over the weekend from the geek heaven that is Tottenham Court Road.

Since I'm getting back into linux and putting more and more data into the cloud, it really makes a lot of sense - and I can't argue with the 7 or so hours of battery life I got today with light use. The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to - especially when swapping between the netbook and full-size laptops - but I can cope with a few typos if the end result is no more back pain.

Of course I had to ditch the custom Xandros distribution that Asus ships in favour of a full Ubuntu 8.10 installation. I followed the Tombuntu installing Ubuntu 8.10 on the Eee PC 901 instructions, although I opted for ext2 filesystems (ext3 is journaling and so a little slower) and I've disabled bluetooth in the BIOS since I'm not planning to use it. I also worked through the four tweeks for using linux with solid state drives, though I skipped the step for Firefox as I'm planning to use a Webkit browser shortly. I also updated my grub settings to set the boot delay to zero - it's nice to see the machine start up so quickly.

Some other tweaks I did can be found on the Ubuntu using Eee PC page - not all of which are needed as a lot is configured automatically with 8.10.

So far the machine does exactly what I want - we'll see if a few days on the road with it has me wishing I had the MacBook Pro back...

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