Playing With an Asus EEE PC

Way back when we first started getting the house situated, we worked on a way to get everyone online.

My wife got a Mac laptop, a white MacBook, now about three years old or so.

I bought a desktop, a really killer Linux system with RAID and the whole shebang. I also have a belongs-to-the-day-job black MacBook.

My toddler son got a destined-to-be-scrapped Mac G5, which was top of the line before Apple moved to Intel processors but today was adequate for playing DVD's and playing online flash games, which are the two things he pretty much limits himself to doing.

My daughter, a teenager, klutzy and at times rather irresponsible (she's destroyed somewhere between three and five phones in a year and a half and she's responsible for replacing them herself...and she still doesn't take better care of them) got an EEE PC. A netbook. I thought it would be perfect as a starter laptop for her; it has USB ports so she could use a USB keyboard and mouse to work on papers, it's tiny so she could curl up in a corner somewhere to work on whatever she's working on, works on the wireless network, runs Linux so it's nearly immune to most of the crud out there targeting Windows, and it has a solid state disk, making storage a premium but for what she does it shouldn't matter. The tradeoff was no moving parts so it could take a little more rough handling without the heads of the drive crashing since an SSD drive doesn't have heads or platters to crash.

I was wrong. She managed to damage it once, killing the power supply, necessitating a trip back to the factory. Then months later we notice that she's using her brother's computer more and more; what's wrong with your triple-E?

"The keyboard doesn't work right..."

sigh

I look at the thing. She's dropped it so many times that I feel bad for it. Of course, it's her brother's fault, the four year old tripped over the power cable that she would string across a room; I can see it happening once, maybe twice, but there comes a point where you learn to not string things at ankle level lest electronics go flying, wouldn't you think?

True enough, some of the keys are dead. IThe function keys for the fake number pad function isn't causing it. A reinstall of the software (she hardly did anything to customize the thing) didn't affect it, so it wasn't a software setting. I disassembled the keyboard to reseat the ribbon connecting it to the motherboard. Nothing. I also found that a USB keyboard works fine, so the keys on the keyboard itself aren't sticking.

She just managed to kill certain keys on the keyboard. "It just stopped working," she said.

I've been considering attempting to find something more portable for my computing needs. Mainly for things like going to Barnes and Noble for editing my first draft of a novel in OpenOffice, or doing light web browsing. I'm not sure about the size of the keyboard, but something with the form factor of the EEE PC might fit the bill otherwise, so I take it.

"But I'm using it!"

Keep in mind we've not seen her use it for months, and the power cable was upstairs not even plugged in. When I got it from her the battery was dead. Stone dead.

First things first. After failing to revive the keyboard, I scrounge around a bit and find a possible replacement keyboard on Amazon (of all things) for $15. I put in the order for 3-5 day shipping (overnight was $20!), seeing as the USB keyboard will suffice for a little while as a makeshift replacement.

Second, I do updates, seeing as she's not touched the software updates. I get a bad taste in my mouth when I realize that Asus looks to have pretty much abandoned the plucky little 4G Surf (no webcam, 512 meg of RAM, 4 gig storage). OpenOffice is stuck at version 2. Ugh.

I again scrape the webbertubes for some advice and find that Ubuntu, the Linux distro I run on my desktop now, has a Netbook Remix available. It's a modern distro meant specifically for netbooks (big surprise from the name, I know). Download, burn the CD, boot and install, run the updates, and now the netbook is running essentially Ubuntu 9.10 with the latest kernel and security updates (and OpenOffice 3!).

I even get Skype installed. I plugged in a USB Quickcam, and found that it worked with Cheese, the camera booth app. Skype, unfortunately, refuses to work with it. Why? No clue. But it does appear that it will receive video, and I can do audio (and text) chat. So that much works.

I get SSH installed, and the SSH Server. If you know what secure shell is, then you know how cool this can be. After getting that installed, I logged into the EEE from my desktop computer with X forwarded and ran the rest of my updates and changes from my desktop console while the EEE sat on a stand charging up with the LCD sleeping.

Can it play online movies like YouTube? Barely. The thing has 512 meg of RAM and is a Celeron 900 Mhz processor. It strains and grunts and groans, but if you're not taxing the little dude it'll play them.

It can also record in MP3 format now that I installed Audacity.

Storage? It won't store movies well. At the moment it is running with about 300 meg free on storage. I could stick in an SD card to add a couple gig, though.

What are my initial impressions? It's impressive what it can do. I can't take it out as a road warrior device yet because of the lack of a functioning onboard keyboard; that'll have to wait until the new one comes in, and then I have to hope it's the right kind and will fit. I also don't know what shape the battery is in. My daughter swore it won't hold a charge; I haven't tested it yet, really.

I also don't like the way the trackpad buttons work. It's like a rocker bar to left and right click. Seems...weird. And of course the keys are tiny and take some getting used to in order to use (a task that's pretty impossible when 1/4 of the keys don't work).

For its size, it's impressive, and when I'm in my home network range it can get a boost from the fact that I can secure shell into my home computer and tap into some of the applications and files from there. Out on the road I could probably secure shell into a remote system, but speed would be an issue. Could it function on it's own?

It would probably be better if I had dainty feminine hands, but again, the jury will have to hold out on that until I get a better chance to test it when and if it gets a functional keyboard. I have enough trouble typing properly with a full size keyboard (although the tiny keys may force me to take my time and not make as many mistakes in the first place...)

So that's my new project. The daughter is computerless and at the mercy of her four year old brother; it's been made clear to her that that computer was made for him and she had one free computer and she broke it and stopped using it, so it's been appropriated. She's free to save her money from her job to get a cheap laptop, and instead she opts to play Pogo and Facebook games on her brother's Mac. If he tells her to get off it, she does. Which gives a four year old much joy to have power over someone, it seems (to be fair he rarely kicks her off his computer though).

I'll have to see how things play out. Maybe I'll update this more after the keyboard comes in, supposedly this upcoming week!