I’ve been using the EeePC for two weeks now and it seems a good time to register a few impressions and document the four or five tweaks I’ve made to improve the overall experience.
Thanks to the weight and the form factor, I’m finding that I do actually carry this thing around with me. The wireless has worked flawlessly (both on Mason’s wireless network and my home LinkSys) and battery life seems to run about two and a half hours. I’ve had good success reading my email and OpenOffice works just fine for handling the various Word and Excel attachments (BTW, if you spend most of your time in Excel…don’t bother with one of these).
In short I had a list of tasks I hoped this machine could perform and so far it’s handled all of them.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to shrink my fingers and yes, the keyboard is still very small. Typing a long document is a challenge but for email, web surfing and simple messaging, it’s all good. I swapped the Caps Lock and Control keys (that’s something we old timers do) and programmed it to ignore the Caps Lock key altogether since I seemed to be hitting it constantly.
I do find my productivity with the unit soars when I use a mouse and Logitech’s VX Nano is a great companion for this unit—the wireless receiver is small and can be left in one of the USB ports. A mouse saves many, many keyboard and trackpad actions.
Is the screen too small? To be honest the 7 inch screen seems positively panoramic if you’re comparing it to a portable computing device like a PDA, iPhone or other handheld computer. Somehow it doesn’t seem fair to compare the EeePC’s screen to a regular notebook so for this sort of niche device it seems just fine. Sure, I’ll be interested in the 9†screen on the next rev of the EeePC (I think it’s rumored for Summer) but only if it doesn’t add too much size or weight. If that happens, I’ll be more than happy to stick with the 7″ model.
After installing just a few simple programs and doing a few updates, I find that I have only about 700Mb left on the 4GB internal SSD drive. That’s not great but it’s not a big problem. I’ve modified the preferences in the programs I’m using so everything saves to the SD card and added symbolic links in a few areas so path names stay nice and short (as in “easy-to-type”).
While you can tweak many aspects of this little computer, here are four or five changes I’ll recommend:
1. Install the full desktop.
The EeePC ships with this simple, icon-based desktop.
It’s relatively easy to go with a full Linux desktop instead:
There are at least three ways to accomplish this, each covered in detail on the eeeuser.com wiki. I had success with the “manual” method (and moved my task bar to the left side of the screen and turned on auto-hide to gain just a bit more space).
2. Add a few additional software repositories
Until I added additional repositories, the “apt-get install” couldn’t find a copy of Joe (an editor I like to use so I can leverage the Borland editor muscle memory in my fingers). I added these four lines to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free deb http://dccamirror.xandros.com/dccri/ dccri-3.0 main deb http://www.geekconnection.org/ xandros4 main deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/eeepcrepos/ p701 main etch
then issue this command: sudo apt-get update
then you can get a copy of joe (and many other packages) too:
sudo apt-get install joe
3. Install “TINY” themes for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Again, the eeeuser.com wiki explains all:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:shrinkfirefox
You can see how a tiny theme helps recover screen real estate. Here I’ve reduced my Firefox browser to a single menubar (click MENU and you get access to the other choices like File, Edit, View, History and so on).
4. Install a Print to PDF capability.
I’m finding this very useful when I want to save a page I find while on the net (e.g., a Google Maps screen) and then have access to it later when I’m not in range of a wireless signal.
- sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
- point your browser to http://localhost:631/
- Add printer
- Doesn’t matter what you type in the next three blanks, hit continue
- On next page, choose “Virtual Printer (PDF)”
- On next page, choose Postscript
- On next page, select Color Postscript option that appears
- Click Add Printer
- Type root and your user password at the authentication prompt
5. Resize fonts for GTK applications.
While I haven’t yet found a way to update GTK to 2.10 (which I need to do if I want to run the Firefox 3 Beta 4 browser), it is possible to make GTK fonts smaller so applications like Pidgin (a multi-network IM client) fit the Eeepc screen.
Open a terminal window (CTRL-ALT-T)
Edit /home/user/.gtkrc-2.0
e.g., kwrite /home/user/.gtkrc-2.0 {return}
Paste this code in:
gtk-icon-sizes = "gtk-menu=8,8:
gtk-button=8,8:
gtk-small-toolbar=8,8:
gtk-large-toolbar=12,12:
gtk-dialog=16,16:
gtk-dnd=16,16"
gtk-toolbar-style = GTK_TOOLBAR_ICONS
gtk-font-name = "DejaVu Sans 8"
Save the file.
6. Have No Fear.
Remember that if you brick your little computer (what I call “fix it till it breaks”), you can quickly get bring it back to its “unboxed” state:
As you reboot, begin pressing F9.
When you see the prompt, select Recovery Option
This will revert to a completely clean version of the Xandros Linux (with Easy Icon interface).
How can this be?
Simple. The internal drive has two copies of the linux partition. The first is mounted read-only and then the second is mounted on top of it (and all your changes occur there). You can’t modify the software on the underlying partition. When it’s time to restore, the machine simply blows away the secondary partition (the one you’ve “enhanced”) and returns to the pristine “as shipped” version.
Yes, this does mean that about 1 GB of space is “wasted” and unavailable to you. You can find information on how to go about deleting this “safety” partition but I don’t really see the point. After all, during my exploration of the EeePC, I’ve had to restore twice already.