ASUS Eee PC

After queuing for around 5 hours at the launch of Eee PC at Sitex 2007 on 1st Dec 2007, I got the Eee Pc. To my disappointment, there is a bright dot on the LCD panel, the warranty does not cover zero dead pixel, so I have to bear with it. The immediate response was to sell it off to someone who might be very eager to have one and would not mind the dead pixel. After a little while, I decided to keep it. I love the small size and the light weight.

Coming from a PDA user point of view, this is something more convenient if you want to enter some amount text. I still love the Palm OS based Treo 650 mobile phone, the Maemo based N770. When I know that I am not likely to have to enter much text, I will bring the N770 with me, I will be able to read email, with gtalk and company jabber IM available to chat, using gizmo SIP client to call out. I am also able to run VNC over SSH or VPNC to do remote support. But that is for light use of those utilities.

When it come to heavy use of those utilities, I will definitely take Eee PC with me, as larger screen and keyboard is required. Remote desktop and Citrix client are then available also.

For the moment, as I am trying to see how useful it is as it is bundled, I will not change the OS. I find the dictionary in Easy mode useful for common use, as it has English to English, English to Chinese, Chinese to English lookups. SCIM is pre-installed, unlike on N770.

FBreader is included for ebook reading. I like the fact that it can read both chm and plucker format.

Scrolling using the built-in touch pad is rather difficult for me, I preferred to use the scroll button of a USB mouse.

Typing on it is a bit cram and take quite a while to get use to. The position of the Right Shift key is a bit out, luckily, there is a shell script available to change the position, followed by changing of 4 key tops.

The Huawei E220 USB modem works immediately after running the connection wizard and the DNS settings are fine without additional work. As contrast with OpenSuSE 10.3 and Fedora 8, in both cases, the driver for Vodafone Linux Driver need to be downloaded and installed and the DNS need to be configured manually.