A new toy found its way onto my desk this week. An Asus eeePC 1000 came my way the other day.. I’d long been eyeing up the eeePC line, since they first came out.
The eeePC line is one of a new generation of the so-called Netbooks. An amazingly small, yet powerful line of sub-notebooks that have lots of built-in networkability.
The 1000 model builds on prior models, adding upgrades like Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and 802.11n, to complete the package. The 1000 also kicks it up a notch in screen size, now up to 10″, driven by an Intel i915 chipset at a resolution of 1024×600.
Storage-wise, the 1000 has 40GB of SSD (Solid State Drive), split over 2 drives, one 8GB, the other 32GB, as well as a built-in SD slot that’s SDHC capable. The system shipped standard with a variant of Xandros Linux installed, though if Windows is your thing, you can get a similar unit with Windows XP Home Edition loaded on it. I spent the better part of an hour looking at the pre-installed Xandros setup, until I dumped it in favor of Ubuntu Hardy. Installing Ubuntu on the system is a breeze, thanks to UNetbootin. It chews up an Ubuntu (or a ton of other distributions for that matter) install CD and turns a FAT32 formatted USB thumbdrive into a USB installer. For the Hardy desktop version, you need a 1GB drive, as the installer files take about 700MB on the drive.
Once you’ve got Hardy installed, the fun just gets started. Now you’ve got a machine that boots fine, but has no networking, be it wired or wifi. Fortunately, others have already gone boldly and taken care of this. Head over to Adam’s site and pick up the kernel and modules, reboot, setup the repository and you’re off to the races.. There are some scripts out there to setup hotkeys, etc., but I didn’t really care for those, preferring to do it myself. Check the wiki over at eeeuser.com and read all about it.
Bottom line? It’s a great little machine. About the only thing I haven’t done yet is setup my 3G card, because I haven’t gotten around to switching out my Verizon ExpressCard for a USB model, but stay tuned..
