More on the EEE PC

I had previously posted that I was confiscating my teenage daughter's EEE PC (the 4G model, also known as the 701) because:
A) she abuses technology in ways I didn't think was possible
B) she never uses it
C) she broke the keyboard, after having it sent back for a factory repair on a power/motherboard issue
D) she consistently had it falling on the floor and it was never her fault, it was always her little brother's fault that the power cable was strung across the room and the hyperactive 4 year old would stumble over said power cable.

So I thought I'd take it and try using it. The new keyboard came in (remarkably affordable off an Amazon third-party reseller, only $15). I also had said that I erased the Asus-supplied Linux version in favor of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix from Canonical; essentially Ubuntu with a graphical shell better suited to netbook desktop real estate. That means it's actually kept up to date (boo Asus!) and it was in parity with my desktop Ubuntu system in regards to updates and fixes and applications that can be installed.

I've been using it on and off for a few days and thought I'd do a quick revisit.

First, the keyboard install wasn't that bad. There are three tiny meal clips that you have to push back, located along the top of the keyboard (near the pause, f6, and ~ keys). They kind of felt chincy in the quality, and I think I managed to scratch them, is they don't look like they're holding the keyboard very securely but the keyboard hasn't fallen off yet so...I'm going with it.

Once the clips are pushed back you lift the keyboard and slide it out of the tray slightly. There's a ribbon that is held in with two slider clips; you push the clips back towards the display (parallel to the motherboard) to release the plastic ribbon and the keyboard comes right off. Slide the new ribbon in, lock it, slide the keyboard in place, and pry the clips back over the keyboard and it's done.

Now the bigger challenge. I haven't used it to edit my novel yet, but I have done some web browsing and watching movie clips (avi, mpg, flv...) to see what it can do. The 701 has only 512 meg of RAM and a ~900 Mhz processor, and storage is a premium, so how did it handle things?

Web browsing; it's running Ubuntu, so it has the latest Firefox available (with the flash blocker to stop ads; helps with processor power too). Because of the slower processor, you shouldn't try watching more than one video at a time. You shouldn't even scroll while a flash-based player is playing or the video stutters and starts caching a bit. It's not like I'm doing high-end HD video crunching and the performance was something I found to be acceptable. There is a bit of juggling to get multiple tabs to work well and some videos don't scale properly to the oddly proportioned display resolution. Overall, web browsing is acceptable, but I'd not be beyond trying an iPad as a web browsing tool primarily due to screen real estate.

The video watching was a test in seeing what it could handle with codecs. I stuck some movies of different formats on a 2 gig SD card and tried playing them. The built-in movie player application threw up a huge number of "plugin needed" errors, then would try to download new plugins to handle various codecs. I then opened a terminal and ran "sudo apt-get install vlc" to install the VLC movie player, which handled a larger array of formats and handled them well. I had one case where the plugin installer hung on the display (movie player, not VLC related). I couldn't move it and even though the interface was responding in the background I didn't know how to get a process list up to kill the offending application or how to bring up a terminal to kill the process or how to bring up another desktop to get to a process manager from there, so my options were limited to logging in from another computer using SSH or use Control-Alt-Delete to restart the EEE. I restarted it. Not that it takes that long, but it was annoying. I need to figure out how to use a shortcut to get to another desktop or bring up a terminal session.

Other than that movies played half-decently. Surprising.

And the most obvious: keyboard evaluation. The keyboard is indeed something to get used to. Especially when you're built like a fridge, like I am. I had quite a bit of trouble not hitting the right-arrow key instead of shift, which was a pain when I tried using a spreadsheet I created in OpenOffice. But I knew this would take some work to get used to, and I'm trying to give it time (like editing my novel on it...can I get used to the annoyance?)

Any other surprises? I'm continually surprised at the software this little thing can run. I may have already mentioned that I installed SSH and SSHD, so I can use secure shell to log into it from another Unix machine (or Windows using PuTTY). It's weird to think I'm remotely logging into this thing the size of a paperback book and then install software or alter files from a remote system. I can also use the FUSE filesystem with the SSHFS module to mount other filesystems (or the EEE's filesystem) using secure shell, so I can edit and manipulate remote files as if they were local.

I also installed Synergy. If you're not familiar with it, it's a GREAT application for people with multiple computers in the same area. I wrote about it before but here's a quick overview: it's a software KVM without the V.

Scenario: as I type this I'm using my desktop computer to enter text on the blog. Sitting next to my keyboard is the EEE. I'm bouncing between the blog and the EEE to do updates as well as configure a few things on the EEE. Rather than stopping what I'm doing and task switching to the tiny keyboard and touchpad of the EEE, I am using Synergy on the netbook and the Synergy Server on my desktop to link the two computers. I just slide the mouse off the left side off my desktop computer and the mouse "appears" on the EEE display, meaning now my keyboard and mouse are focused on the EEE. I type and the characters are on the EEE. I move the mouse, the pointer moves on the EEE. I slide the mouse off the right hand side of the EEE's display, and my mouse reappears on my desktop computer's display.

Neat, huh? Neater still is I can have four computers do this off the "Synergy Server" computer: top, bottom, left and right. And thanks to secure shell, I can encrypt the connection so the connection links are cryptographically secure.

It's a neat way to do work on the desktop and laptops at the same time, and the software (ssh, synergy, etc.) are all in the Ubuntu repos (and synergy itself is cross platform, so you can mix and match Linux, Windows and OS X clients and servers).

The keyboard is definitely annoying at times; I'm working to adapt to it, so I'm going to reserve judgment for the moment. In the meantime I'll note that the EEE has managed to recognize and use a USB keyboard without problem, just as it has recognized a USB CD burner (how I installed Ubuntu NR in the first place) and the SD card and a USB memory stick without issues.

The thing that is simultaneously neat and a bullet in the foot is that this is, for all practical purposes, Ubuntu Linux on a miniature PC. It can do a huge number of things, but it sometimes takes some stretching and bending to accomplish them.

For example, installing Synergy, VLC, and SSH were straight from the repos, no real work necessary (if you're used to Ubuntu, anyway). Just select and install. Or from the terminal, issue the apropos apt-get command. But the new interface tries to hide the ability to access multiple desktop workspaces (kind of like virtual desktops). Hitting control-alt- will select a new desktop so I can organize my applications, or in the case of the one app getting "stuck" I might have been able to switch to another desktop to pull up the terminal and regain practical control of my EEE. When I tried it, it wouldn't let me. Just kept telling me I had one workspace.

But...it could do it. It does support multiple workspaces. It just wouldn't let me because it was configured for one, which is a sensible default when the screen is this tiny, I suppose. I couldn't use the workspace manager to configure a new desktop the way I do on my desktop because that "useless" interface was removed for the streamlined Netbook Remix interface.

So the fix is to open a terminal and enter the command "gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/
general/num_workspaces 4 --type int" where the 4 is the number of workspaces I want. Intuitive? Heck no. It was a total Google job to find this solution.

And now I have 4 workspaces. But here's the thing; I'm mixed on this feature. The fact is that a tiny device like this is kind of stretching the computer metaphor. Now small can you make a computer before the desktop paradigms become stretched too thin? I'm multitasking desktop applications on something I can barely type on because the keyboard's too small, with a processor that is being pushed to it's limits if I have OpenOffice open and a web browser playing YouTube videos at the same time, with RAM that is furiously juggled because it's only 512 meg. The graphics subsystem can barely handle itself let alone adding the 3-D candy of Compiz (which is turned off, but seems to be available as an option).

In short there are a number of features on the EEE that are probably inappropriate for the platform but are available, taking up memory space or storage space (which is a premium on this little thing), just as they are available on my desktop. Is it really necessary to have the same features on a 512 meg 900Mhz system with 4 gig of storage and a all-in-one design the size of a paperback book as my dual-core 2.13 Ghz desktop with 2 gig of RAM and 200+ gig of storage?

Probably not, at least not for the average user. Still, I can connect a USB hub to the EEE, and from that have a printer, keyboard and mouse, and I can hook up an external monitor, even if the resolution isn't all that great due to limitations of the graphics processor. In other words, the EEE can be a really portable computer for going between work and home with emergency access to my data stored on it when I'm in between "docks".

That's the only reason I could see for using netbooks like this with features that don't really scale down this small; portable desktops where you can dock it for convenient access, while still having access to your data while out at the coffee shop.

I'm still using it and adapting to it. I find myself leaning on the Mac laptop still for things because while it's not as small or light, it does just work, and I'm not fighting frustration with the keyboard.

But I did swear I was going to give the mini-keyboard a shot...so look forward to another installment of triple-EEE info in the near future!