...while watching football on TV, I imagine I'm sharing those activities with lots of Americans right now. And since I'm watching live TV, that means I'm at the back table where my little portable set is connected to rabbit ears. And since I'm at the back table, that means my computing is being done on Salleee, my little eeepc netbook, from which I'm sending this post, and on which I hope to do a bit of writing while keeping one eye on the game.
All things considered, this is a pretty nice way to spend Thanksgiving Day.
Last weekend my new 701SD arrived in the mail. So far I am loving it. I installed KDE4 + debian squeeze on it and its amazing. For fonts I reduced everything to 7pts, and made my menu bar (panel) autohide. So far I have no issues with the 800x480 resolution on the 701. I do have some pet peaves with Asus though. It seems that they deal with the worst keyboard manufacturer of all times, most of the EEE's except for maybe the 1000HE have the worst keyboards around today. They are a cross between buckle spring keyboards, and really cheap silicon.
The worst of all keys on the 701SD keyboard is the space-bar. It is truly annoying. It is hard enough trying to type on the little keyboard (which I am getting used to < 7 days from using it), the space bar seems to only respond when pressed firmly from the center. This goes against the design of the spacebar in the first place where it can be easily press-able by either hand. After a couple of days of usage I decided to mod the space-bar, since I couldn't take it any-more. First I took out the space-bar
Then I cut out two pieces of thin cardboard, around 20mm x 5mm
Which I proceeded to wrap with a single layer of black electrical tape. Then attached them to the centre of the bottom of the bar from space with two vertical strips of electrical tape.
My space-bar now responds in a better fashion. I no longer want to smash it into pieces. Occasionally it does not sense the key-press, I can actually reproduce it by touching it from the far left end, but while actively typing its no longer an issue. Nextup, I will be proceeding with underlaying my keyboard with tinfoil.
Eureka, the deed is done. I finally managed to get Ubuntu for netbooks [Ubuntu Netbook Remix] installed on my ASUS EeePC 1000H. I think my main problem was that I didn't follow the instructions, if you do - you should be fine. That means, use a USB thumbdrive or flash drive if you're going to grab the image from the link below. Also, it was a day for issues, my webcam drivers were messed up and I got a DVD stuck in my macbook. That's all behind me, now I am cruising with Ubuntu on my netbook. Here's a little video of my experience: Download the image from here: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook Install notes: 1) Use a USB thumbdrive/jumpdrive or flash drive 2) Read the instructions after the download 3) Use the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles to create your bootable USB drive or flash drive 4) Enter your bios settings (F2 on my EeePC) and make sure your boot order is set correctly, then boot with your USB drive or flash drive inserted 5) Choose your partition options wisely, decide if you want to dual boot - or if like me, you want to dump windows completely. Since I had data on other partitions, I chose only to remove the windows partition (3rd option, custom). I created a partition that was as large as the original windows, minus twice the size of my ram (x2 = 4 gigs). The I put Ubuntu on the empty big partition & and swap space on the extra 4 gig partition. After the install, things I've noticed: 1) Super zippy (that's very fast in Texas terminology) 2) Webcam is sub-par, so beware if you're a demon on Skype 3) Initial Audio volume is really low, make sure you click on the speaker icon at the top left, go into Volume Control... and set PCM and Line Out to max, then close and adjust from there. 4) Make sure you download the upgrades (see below)Upgrades: 1) Go to the Administration section on the left menu 2) Select Synaptic Package Manager 3) Click "Mark all upgrades" 4) Click "Apply" 5) Follow the promptsThat's all for now. I'll give an update after a week or so of using it. Tomorrow's challenge - Snow Leopard.
Still looking for a good linux distribution for my eeepc 701 4g, since unfortunately it seems that the native Xandros OS does not offer automatic upgrade to recent releases of many important softwares (as Firefox, Openoffice...): too bad that Asus now is promoting almost only Win XP! . So far I tested Easy Peasy and eeebuntu.. now I am quite excited to test Jolicloud, a rather peculiar distro, focused on social web... let's see... :)
