JasonD
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« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2008, 12:29:34 AM » |
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I have changed my mind about the keyboard, it is not so bad now that I had a few days to get used to it. I shall test this theory by typing this message/mini-review on the eee.
The pre-installed typing program (clearly aimed at kids, but nevermind that) is very helpful in getting used to the keyboard, I can type at reasonable speeds with minimal mistakes.
Remaining oddities, backslash/bar is on the Z key (I reasigned them to the caps lock key with xmodmap, requires some fidddling with a script). `¬| key is between Esc and F1 meaning the number keys are further left than usual, #/~ key is to the right of ], not below it as is usual of proper keyboards, so the enter key is horizontal instead of vertical, IYSWIM. Acute accented vowels are marked on the keyboard (ie AltGr+a works as well as AltGr+; a), this is different to my desktop which has things like ae and o-slash. It wouldn't let me type other diacritic marks like š (s-caron, AltGr+Shift+' s) by default without getting two characters (open a terminal, start kcontrol and turn off keyboard layouts works, but I'm not sure that is the proper way). If you never have reason to type any such characters this won't be a problem.
But a word of warning, when you go back to a regular keyboard you will start typing gibberish until your fingers remember where all the grown up keys are located.
As for the rest of the hardware, it runs quite warm and the fan comes on often, it is quieter than most laptop fans I've heard but is still quite intrusive in a quiet environment.
Wifi works with no hassles, setup was easier than the last Windows laptop I tried to get working.
Screen colour accuracy is good enough for most purposes, but maybe not for photo editing. Reds in particular look a little brown. Viewing angles are not great either, but are good enough for people sitting beside you to see what you are doing (if that is good or bad depends on what you are doing), just don't plan on doing any presentations to a room full of people. Not that you would on such a small screen.
Sound quality through the speakers is pretty much as you'd expect, rubbish. But the headphone output is excellent, just the slightest trace of background hiss during silent moments.
It comes with a cloth to wipe it, and you will need it, the glossy finish picks up more fingerprints than an episode of CSI. Don't buy the black version.
LEDS on the front edge (power, battery, SSD activity, wifi) are annoying, but your hand will block them from view most of the time. The blue wifi LED in particular is excessively bright (you can see it in the photo above), and battery flashes at < 80% charge, the manual says it flashes faster when it runs low but in my experience that is not the case. I haven't yet made it to the claimed 8 hours on a full charge, but did manage about 4.5 hours playing some pre-ripped DVDs on an NFS share over wifi.
Software: Everything that comes pre-installed that I've tried worked as it was intended, and most people will be happy with what they get in the box. There are programs for all the common things, and many more common KDE apps installed that you won't find in the easy interface, but there is nothing easy about knowing what they are called unless you are already familiar with them.
The work tab is reasonable, Star Office (Sun's proprietary version of OpenOffice.org) is installed, I'm not sure how this differs from plain OOo.
I expect most people won't be interested in what they'll find on the Learn tab, other than perhaps the typing program I mentioned, but once you are used to the keyboard you won't use that either. I have little interest in the games, I dare say if you want games you should buy a DS or a PSP. You can't run Crysis on an eee. I'm not familiar with many Linux games, but Neverball (in the community repositories mentioned later) is almost playable if you turn all the settings down and use a mouse.
The play tab has a proprietary DVD player program, which presumably needs a USB DVD drive (which I don't have), it would not play pre-ripped .iso or VIDEO_TS folders, and while it did play individual VOBs, it did so with no subtitle options. The 'Media Player' application (smplayer frontend for mplayer) can play DVD .iso files, VIDEO_TS folders and VOBs with correct aspect ratio, subtitles and title/chapter navigation but does not have proper menu support, it also plays everything else I have to hand, Xvid, mpeg, and the sample WMVs that come with the eee. There are other programs in the various tabs but they were mostly as expected so I won't bother mentioning them.
More generally, geeks will notice that many programs are not the latest version (eg Firefox 2.0.0.14) and Free Software advocates will be disappointed at the inclusion of proprietary programs which have better Free equivalents (eg Adobe Reader). Other program oddities include Picasa - a Windows app that uses Wine, but Wine is not available if you want to run other Windows programs. Which seems daft.
Which brings me to the subject of other programs, which is my main complaint. If everything you want to do is possible with the installed programs (which I won't list here) then the next paragraph might not be of interest.
Installing programs on most modern distros is simple, The eee runs a variation of Xandros is based on Debian so you have apt and its associates (apt-get, synaptic, etc), which is rather useless when Asus repositories contain nothing that is not already installed. And don't bother with apt-get udate and apt-get upgrade, it will download 180MB of updated packages and then give up when it finds some needed packages are broken (missing) from the repository. You can't use Xandros proper repositories and while instructions on the eeeuser wiki for adding community supported repositories will give you some extra options, they are not as well stocked as proper distros, and some packages I tried to install have broken dependencies. Linux won't win any new fans if people mistakingly believe all distros to be like this.
But for what it sets out to do, it does well. For web browsing, emails, as a general purpose media player (if you can live without the DVD menus, and as long as you get some headphones or plug in speakers), or for actually doing something productive, it is very good. And lasts long enough on batteries that you can take it out and not have to carry the power supply and a bundle of cables with you.
Plans for this week: figure out how to add what I want, a proper KDE menu, get Konqueror drag and drop local to ftp working (possibly clipboard related?), dvd playback with menus (xine-ui I guess), a decent code editor (kate is already there, geany would be nice), miscellaneous other useful but not essential dev tools, shoutcast station list for Amarok, a better calculator (speedcrunch), vmware console, PHP for general purpose scripting (I never did learn enough bash to do anything clever), maybe MySQL and Apache just to see if I can('t). Can I do it without throwing Xandros away and installing something else? I know I can do all that with a proper distro, probably staying with the ubuntu family having run (K)ubuntu full time on my main computer for about 3 years.
Which brings me to the end of these disorganised thoughts. Maybe helpful. Maybe not. But my theory was correct, the keyboard really isn't so bad after all. Congratulations, you have stayed awake to the end of the post.
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