eeePC Upgrade

Yesterday afternoon I read about the new Ubuntu version (9.04) which was just launched, the Jaunty Jackalope.

I had a look and thought it would be interesting to install, but noticed some other distributions for netbooks. Among which the moblin (moblin.org). This interested me, as Im allway’s into trying out something different. I downloaded the image and used the Ubuntu DiskImager tool to get it on a 4Gb USB stick. This all worked fine!

The tool is great, I have been doing magic in the past to make a bootable USB install which is now a piece of cake! I set-up the Eee Bios to boot from it, and it presented me with a nice bootmenu. But any option I selected, left me with a black screen and an eternal hourglass. I tried switching to console, but it did not let me log in!

So, after a few hours I decided to get the Ubuntu IMG for Netbook remix, and give it a go. To be fair, a piece of cake! in about 45 minutes I had a running system. Another hour to get all the updates, and that’s it!

The touchpad and the wifi worked fine directly. It also detected the screen resolution fine. I switched back to the standard desktop because I hardly used the netbook remix mode from the Easypeasy distro.

Thats all for the moment. One of these day’s Ill try to fine-tune it a bit more as from my first impression it was running a bit slow. Ill keep you posted!

ah, and I have one question which people might be able to respond… why is everything Brown in ubuntu?

My new toy

That (previous story) is how I ended up with yet another new toy, the eee-pc 4g/7001.

This is her, on the left. Even though the picture does not really show the design very well, I liked it because it gives a good idea of its size. It is really small and not heavy at all.

This ee pc in particular, the 4G / 701 is one of the older models and come to me with the following specs:

• Display 7″  (800*480px)
• CPU & Chipset Intel Mobile CPU & chipset
• WLAN WiFi 802.11b/g
• Memory 512MB, DDR2
• Storage 4GB S.S.D. (Solid-State Disk)
• Web-Cam 0.3 Mega Pixel Video camera
• Built-in stereo speaker, Built-in microphone
• Battery Life 3 hrs (4 cells)
• Dimension & Weight 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15~3.5 cm.

It came pre-installed with the Xandros OS, a linux build for the eee-pc.

To be honest, and I have the machine for 3 days now, I am very happy with it. There are two things that I can imagine would bother a lot of people. One is the Keyboard (I’m lucky I have small fingers) and the other one is the screensize, which is 7″ with a resolution of 800*480.

The operating system Xandros, is not too great either. It looks a bit like a children OS.

This is the first thing I have changed. I first tried installing Windows 7 on it, but ran in too many problems (mainly booting the installer from USB… if anyone made that work… pls let me know!).

Now I installed “EasyPeasy”, a Ubuntu based linux distribution that is designed for small displays. This worked fine from the start. Booted fine from USB, installed with no problems and recognised most hardware except for the webcam.
(looks a lot better!)

The screen is nicely layed out and I am very happy with the system. On my laptop I always use to have a small Ubuntu partition, so it is not really new to me. This new window manager makes working with a 7″ screen a lot less painless, even though some (Ubuntu system) windows are too big, leaving the Cancel-Ok buttons hidden.

I am still fine tuning the system. Taking out stuff I do not use, and adding applications, I already miss.

My first plan, when the machine is set up 100% (I’m afraid, really afraid it will never be) Is to play with Google Maps. I have seen some really nice Iphone applications that make use of the Iphones’ GPS. I would like to see if it is possible to obtain the same results and applications using the Gmaps API, in combination with the Firefox Geode location add-on.

To be continued….