Asus eee first thoughts

(Posted from the eee) Santa was good to me and brought me the Asus eee I wanted for christmas I couldn't resist and took a somewhat crap photo of it sitting on the big Rock laptop:

So far I've been medium impressed with the default linux install on the machine, I've had a few problems following an update I ran into the same Firefox segmentation fault that Tim Anderson did which was a disappointment. Also synaptic seems to fall over with great regularity (I'm getting to be a dab hand with apt-get from the command line now) as detailed in the the eeeuser wiki here sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Also a lot of the dialogs on programs aren't correctly sized for the screen which means lots of dragging by holding down the alt key. I tried to like "easy" mode but I've cracked and gone to the advanced mode desktop.

While in Edinburgh I met up with my old friend Rupert Goodwins for a quick drink and Karen (plus other half) from zdnet joined us to escape the rain. Her other half is a travel writer and while Karen failed to buy an eee for him before christmas I think its safe to say it is a hit as a present even for the non-geek in your family.

Overall I like the machine BUT I do feel desktop Linux has some way to go before it's ready to take over the world and for a machine like the eee where the hardware is pretty standard a bit more work is required on the vendors part.

I couldn't make the wireless stuff talk to my phone with WMWifiRouter which turns a windows mobile phone into a wireless router, the eee didn't seem to get a DHCP address correctly and if I fudged that dns lookups didn't seem to work. Sadly neither Rupert or I could persuade it to work with "internet connection sharing" and bluetooth dongle either (although the Rock doesn't have a problem)

For me once I'd got back from Edinburgh to the home network downloaded advanced mode, erlang and gcc I felt a lot happier with the final result. Now I have small machine that I can take out and about and use without being tethered to mains electricity.


Overall:

Hardware 8/10 - Good for it's size and cost but could be better in the screen department, more flash memory and a longer battery life would be nice.

Software 6/10 - Nearly there, good enough for older kids but granny might struggle with some dialog boxes and toileting my webbrowser with an upgrade is poor.

Note these are scoring against something which from everyother vendor would cost three times as much so I'd still recommend it.