Netbook Rambling

Last year I bought an Asus EEE 701 4G netbook. It had the small 7" screen and tiny keyboard but it was a dream come true for work. Low powered computer that just worked. I was so happy with the 4G I bought a second netbook a few months later. I got a shiny new EEE 1000 40G.

Well I started out using the Xandros Linux on the EEE's and it worked great but I wanted more. So I tried Windows XP for a short time but XP was such a bloated and slow mess I went back to Xandros. Then along came UbuntuEEE (Now EasyPeasy) and I was really happy what it did for my 40G. Finally Canonical came out with Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix and it's the bees knees for netbook OS's.

So now what do i want in an upgrade? Well I imagine I won't bother upgrading for a long time. My 701 4G sits around doing nothing but my 1000 40G is chugging along great, still the day will come when it will need replaced so here's my list what I'm looking for now.

• Solid state drive.
• 2 gigs of ram
• 10" display that will handle 1024x768 natively.
• Processor isn't too big a deal. These are supposed to be low powered machines where heat isn't a problem and battery life goes on and on. Little faster wouldn't hurt so long as it's low powered.
  
• Battery life lasts a very long time. (Greater then 8 hours)
  
• The rest of it can basically be like the EEE 1000 40G.
• Support for Linux drivers from the manufacture or Ubuntu Netbook Remix preinstalled. :)
  

Now over time this will change somewhat I imagine, but that is what would make me buy a new netbook at this point.

Ubuntu and the EEE PC

Today I got my EEE PC 1000 40G setup with the new version of Ubuntu EEE. As far as I can tell most of everything I want working out of the box is. I'm very happy with this because the default Asus OS that shipped with my EEE was broken all to hell and back and I did not want to run Windows. (ugh!)

So.. I did have to do some tweeking but I found out in their bug reports all the fixes I needed. First off my web cam was not responding. This was a simple fix, I just had to go in to the BIOS of my EEE and enable the camera. Apparently Asus's Xandros install ignores BIOS settings. This is bad.

The second thing was I wanted to be able to listen to my Gridstream. I used to play Anarchy Online and I do miss that game but I got addicted to WoW. I still listen to GSP though, I love the station even though I'm totally loving being a tauren druid.

Anyhow the media codecs needed to listen to GSP were not in the base install and I had to download those from the update repositories. There still was a bug in the release code that prevented the update manager from function properly. I had to go to the console and delete a bunch of files in two directories by hand. After that things just worked and downloaded and now I have music. The two directories are:

/var/lib/apt/lists
/var/lib/apt/lists/partial

NOTE: You need to keep the partial sub directory itself intact. Here's the bug report.

Oh and just take a look at the sweet Netbook Remix interface!

So yeah, I'm happy now. :)