Comments on: Review of the EeePC 701

By: dam

dam — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:22:11 +0000

Since you are (naturally) going to install Debian on it, take a look at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC . Even if the standard Debian install should work (unless you need the wireless — it requires madwifi), the wiki contains many useful tips and could save you some research.

By: etbe

etbe — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:33:32 +0000

sbdep: Rebooting to work around a bug is fair enough. They had to get their product to market and that meant not fixing all bugs before release, I’ve been in that situation before. Suggesting an unnecessary reboot for a consumer device aimed at Windows users also isn’t so bad as there is a cost to having various models act differently (Linux users can figure out which models need a reboot and act accordingly).

However it is still bad to have packages installed separately, if there was an “upgrade everything and reboot” button (which clearly indicated the issues) then I would not complain as much. Also there is no excuse for the unconditional reboot on upgrading the BIOS.

As for better wireless support, when running the EeePC distribution my machine went so slow as to be unusable (the mouse cursor didn’t work properly) when scanning for wireless. They definitely need to improve things in this regard (I’ve just installed Debian but not tested out how it works in this regard).

By: sbdep

sbdep — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:53:53 +0000

WRT the reboot after package upgrade, that came about due to an underlying bug in unionfs. I am not sure if that is still required in the 900 or 901′s.

The bug relates to a unionfs corruption when installing packages. Since you are installing to the writable portion of the unionfs mount and not the read only portion, it seems that there is a bug when updating executables that causes the fs to get a corrupted view of the file, causing segfaults every time you use the updated application, until you reboot to get unionfs to resync it’s view of the filesystem.

The 900s and 901 use aufs instead of unionfs which does not have this problem. Although I am not sure if the application updater requires the reboot basd on the model, requires it unconditionally.

I do now that there is work ongoing to add better/more wpa/wep encryption modes to the system, and I believe the 901 has more support since they have an updates version of the OS package set, whereas the 900 is based on the same package set as the 701.

By: etbe

etbe — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:15:02 +0000

Michael: I’ve just reviewed the wikipedia page and it seems that the 900 is 5mm deeper than the 701 and weighs 70g more. While 7% greater depth and 3% greater weight isn’t a lot, that combined with a significantly higher price makes the 900 quite unappealing.

The 900 has more flash storage and RAM. I just bought an 8G SD card which gives a total of 12G of storage (vs 20G for a 900) and the 900 has 1G of RAM (I’ve only got 512M). But I expect that I could upgrade the RAM in my 701 and still have paid significantly less than I would for a 900.

One thing that I didn’t consider before I purchased is that a built-in camera might actually be worth using. So the higher resolution camera in the 900 series and above is a benefit.

Jonathan: Interesting idea about removing caps-lock.

As for libssl, I’ve just installed Debian on my EeePC so the security support that ASUS offers is not of no direct interest to me. I suspect that few people who use the default OS on an EeePC will be using ssh.

By: Jonathan Wakely

Jonathan Wakely — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:06:58 +0000

Since I rarely use Caps Lock, but frequently use pipes and backslashes, I remapped the key, see http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:fixpipeandcapslock

Now I don’t care that there’s no Caps Lock indicator LED, since I have no Caps Lock key!

Fingers crossed the libssl bug will be fixed by a new update soon.

By: Michael Croes

Michael Croes — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:51:51 +0000

I have a few small comments. First off the 90x is about exactly the same size as the 701, because of the bezel around the 701′s screen. So I don’t know if I misunderstood your post, but I thought you meant that the 90x was bigger. Second I’ve read in a few places that the 900 would have it’s cpu running at 900 MHz, even though it’s the same as in the 701 where it runs a bit slower, to me that would seem as a definite plus (even though it’s possible to have the cpu in the 701 run at 900 MHz).

I have a 701 myself too, but I planned on replacing it within about half a year, so I got one with pink top and gave it to my girlfriend, who currently is an avid Mac user. I planned on upgrading to a 901, but I’ve changed my mind and want to go for the MSI Wind now… The thing I really dislike about the eee pc 70x/90x series is the keyboard, especially the shifted row you pointed out. I expect to do a lot of programming on my netbook, so I don’t want to miss every special character I type. And the keyboard’s a bit bigger too.

About the default OS on the 701: I think it’s fine if it can give you what you want. I think the same about ubuntu. If you want something special then you got to fix it yourself. For instance my girlfriend needed more than pre-shared key wireless security, so the wireless modules needed to be replaced, wpa supplicant had to be replaced and there’s no gui to change network settings that were not supported by default. Luckily some people ran into the same issues and created packages or tars for the modules and wpa_supplicant that work with the default eee pc kernel, because I wouldn’t like having to compile a kernel for the eee pc (acpi patches and more). It took me some time to get OpenOffice to do spellchecking correctly, or actually it took me some time to get the dictionaries installed. Besides these issues (issues my girlfriend ran into, I don’t use it that much) I think the default OS is quite alright for the average joe.

I hope that when you have debian running you can tell some more about it, I think debian is a very good choice for a custom OS on the eee pc. Personally I think I’d use XFCE with a VTE based terminal (evilvte, xfce’s Terminal, gnome-terminal), should do fine for a lot of work on the go.