EEE PC (ASUS)

Has anyone purchased an EEE PC 701? I am very interested in buying one but first off... I have never used Linux. The price of this laptop is anywhere between $299 and $399. Any information would be great.

Lynne

 

First, you shouldn't post your email address, makes it easy for spam to find you, hopefully creaky will remove it from the title soon. You'll notice there is a little icon at the top right of my message - people can click that to send a private message.

If you want to know how Linux feels without spending much or even anything, either download a copy (absolutely free if you can manage the download) or drop down to your local newsagent and see if any Linux magazines have what they call a Live CD or DVD (something like Ubuntu is usually a safe bet, and is what most of these cheap laptops are derived from). Usually just a case of popping it in your drive, rebooting the computer and a couple minutes later you are running Linux and can take it for a test drive. Should have access to web browser, audio and video, office programs and a few basic games.

If you want to know exactly how it feels on that particular system, head down to wherever is selling it and ask if you can have a play around on it.

Don't be scared into thinking Linux is difficult to use at all either. Might take a couple of days to become as familiar with it as Windows, but you shouldn't have any problems with immediately doing all the basic stuff like internet, email, word processing, mp3, DVDs etc. ESPECIALLY on the Eee, it should almost all be there ready to use out of the box.

I don't know if anyone here uses it (some guy had something similar, but had a knee jerk reaction and formatted it with Windows, ignore that thread), but I'm sure all will be quite willing to help you and find out for ourselves how it performs.

 

or you could install virtual machine system. vmware is pretty god. you can download trial version. its simple and you dont have to bother with drivers and stuff. if you mess up something you can just delete your virtual hdd and start all over until you get a hang of it. basically you cant break anything

 

Wanna bet?? A linux distro with ntfs read/write enabled will write all over your windows installation :lol: Plus that is pretty much a n00bish statement about drivers.. if the linux OS makes direct hardware calls for applications it will usually hang resulting in the need for a forced hardware reset.. Potential hdd and filesystem damage, up to and including the total loss of the entire drive filesystem as it can overwrite/erase the filesystem flag in the MBR.. Running a VM requires a little foreknowledge and care.

I speak from experience.

These little cheap machines looked good at first glance, but I didn't look much further as they don't seem to be up to much more than a bit of web browsing and text editing.. they are what they are, and it's still true you gets what you pays for. Going to have a good read through creaky's links and see if I can form an opinion.

There is another coming out in june/july.. called the Elonex One.

edit Been and looked around.. it seems to me that the 800x600 sereen res is actually a limitation of the screen not other hardware problem as the graphics hardware on the mobo will do 1600x1400.. I would have to replace that screen with one that at least does 1024x768..
Apart from that and some concerns over the battery life I think for the money (minus the Xandros customised OS.. I don't and never liked Xandros, so I'm not going to make any comment on that choice) it is a pretty good allround package. Don't hope for an XP version now.. it's discontinued to hardware manufacturers from the 18th of this month (and would only be available on the 8 gig version anyway as XP will take 2+ just to install.. bundled with all the bloatware symantek and junk trial stuff..(plus $100 on the price to pay M$)

Doesn't look like a bad little machine all told.. but not for me.. I would buy an older p3 lappy and work with what it has.

 

wtf, what i meant was its good for learning. and no it cannot harm anything because hdd of the virtual machine behave like separate file that windows cannot access in like a file contest. what i mean that nothing can come through. linux on virtual machine acts like a separate machine. so whatever happens on it you can delete vhd or install some other os on it or whatever you want.

as for the drivers everything works pretty fine. i mean youre not gonna play games that require graphics 3d acceleration on virtual machine doh... i used vmware a lot until i went over some basics on linux. you can also find some old pc and screw around with it why not. i didn know where to put this pc of mine in the house yet another one :S
also vmware provides option of installing tools on it that inhances performance of your machine. it allows you to change resolution far more than hosts. so dont worry about that neither. ill read some of those posts and see if i could change my mind . i would love to for everybody to stop acting like theyre going to die if they mess up something on their machine. we live to learn. i never learned to fix something if i didnt break it once in a while

 

varnull was making a point that a virtual machine is hardly a perfect sandbox. Unless you are very careful in your configuration, there is a very real chance of allowing it to interfere with the host. She wouldn't be bullshitting when she says she's talking from experience.

I'm all for learning from mistakes, but far better to know how not to make one in the first place. Prevention is the best cure and all that. Virtual OS can clobber a system just as much as much as a true one, and malware can be even more insidious thanks to the sense of security one gets from testing in a VM first as a program can lay dormant if it detects it is being virtualized: http://www.securiteam.com/securitynews/5OP0B1PCAA.html

 

oh yeah i forgot to mention. linux has no ability to write on ntfs system just to read so theres no harm. that works ONLY FOR DUAL BOOTING.
try all of that somethimes >_>

 

I'M SAYING THAT YOU ARE NOT GOING TO USE A VIRTUAL MACHINE TO WORK ON YOUR COMPUTER. vmaware is a program and like any other program it has bugs and sidefects. no need to get excited. it just allows you to screw around a bit until you get the hang on it. for me its better than live cd >_>. say it isnt so

 

You are so, so wrong. http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

 

so what. it cannot do anything without it can it

 

we are getting too deep in this discussion and its late. you were right dough with the malicious stuff it can get to the host computer over shared RAM. but when you look widely at this you get almost the same picture. i enjoyed this little discussion its always god to hear someone else's opinion. and about that driver it doesn't make any diference if you install it later because after the installation its strictly our responsibility how should we use that because the system itself won't harm anything. i admit that i didnt know about that ntfs driver until today and i have to admit too that i asked my self this morning if there is a driver like that after reading one post nm which and i forgot to google it . thanks for finding it for me lol.

 

wine has a fake_windows directory full of dll's.. any malware that happens to run via a program or is installed with it, say for instance a keygen being used to crack/register some stolen software..

^^ that gives malware the same rights as it has on a windows system.^^

That gets into those dll's (which is the same thing as the windows/system32 directory) and as it has system permissions it can create the same havoc as it can on a windows machine.. with the slightly lessened situation that linux will not spot it running in ram as there is very often no need to have a direct antivirus application running in linux.. That will not stop some self contained little bastard setting itself up in your free space and exploiting whatever windows drivers you may have installed to work with a windows application.

In 5 years I have seen only 4 examples of this kind of thing.. but when they were found they had been up to really nasty things.. one service call was as a result of a visit from law enforcement people because of the nature of the material being passed through the machine by the trojan...

All I'm saying is this.. Don't install wine and run windows applications like a sheep.. 99% don't work properly anyway. Linux has far better applications which are nearly always free.. It is pretty hard to find any applications made for linux which are not free.. and those that are around are made for windows n00bs who don't have the imagination to realise there are alternatives.. NeroLinux is a case in point.. it's expensive and rubbish.. k3b kills it.

Now to VM tools.. they are made for people who want to test applications in a different environment from the one they happen to have.. say I want to test some mac software I am working on.. and I don't happen to have a mac.. or making a port of a windows application.. I will need a VM to test it...

Anything which has read/write access to your storage media can be used by malware to get in.. and once it is in it's results can be unpredictable. Some VM software keeps a pretty large disk cache, and I know malware which can exist after a drive partitioning and formatting.. even a normal file can survive.. ever seen the windows installer bug?? It refuses to copy a file to the HDD?? you run killdisk on the first 10% or so and problem gone?
It's a simple reason.. a file of the same name exists from the last installation in exactly the same sectors, and is flagged read only.. the stupid file table doesn't know it is there... until it tries to write to that area and finds a read only flag already set.. DUH!!!
(I learned more about windows in the last year fixing other peoples than I ever learned while I had a machine around with it on.. odd that.. must be that detached "I know it's crap, but they too n00b to use anything else" attitude... blind em with science. and reading the xp administrators handbook.. and probably 90% of the 15,000 M$ xp pages helps too.. vista sp1 is gonna be fun when it turns all the DRM on.. **whistles and walks away**)

Now then... teach and learn as ddp likes to say. You have at least 2 unix/linux professionals, and some good amateurs in here, and we can be real hard and 1337

 

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." Albert Einstein

 

^^ nice..

Anyway, back to this machine we were asked for opinions on..

Personally I would spend the same money on a reasonable pentium/celeron around the 560MHz mark.. an xp bottom end laptop (IBM made some nice ones).. cheap on ebay, and then because it's only going to have 256mb ram at most I would look around the linux distros for a small light one. The new DSL as a full install looks very good, and being debian base has lots and lots of software... unless it's the size you like, in which case it is an excellent deal.. all apart from that awful google webapps OS which I would replace without even booting it.

That might be fun as there is no cd drive.. everything would have to be done across the network or from a stick. Would need to actually see one before I could make any comments about that.
There is supposedly a new release of this OS available.. the mirrors are broken so I need to try the torrents for the live cd. I don't have a spare machine with anything like the same specs, but it should be good enough for a test.

 

i agree with warnull there are some really nasty things you can get so keep on alert. i had and i always have problems with malicious problems. wine sux anyways i prefer apps made specific for linux. most viruses dont work with linux but there are always gaps in security and those viruses and malicious programs cant wait to exploite them. in my experience i've learned that nothing can be perfect(in this world anyways). also i agree in buying some average machine if youre gonna put linux on it because it runs like lightning compared to windows. you install one app on it and already takes it toll. dont take my word on everything

 

Just installing gOS on a p2-400 (Grace-the ubuntu machine from the screnshots thread) It seems to run fine from the cd, now remember this is an old machine. It detected all the hardware, no headaches connecting to my network.. didn't even have to click a button.. That's nice. Firefox connected, the games work. I don't use facebook or myspace and youtube just annoys me.. but I will test if it has picked up the obscure sound hardware. The graphics seem ok.. aD looked fine in firefox.. haven't checked the screen resolution.
Just installing to a small spare drive to take some screenshots and get a better test of it's capabilities.. like installing software and configuring things. So far though it is different the 2.0beta (Rocket) looks smart and everything seems to work.

Will come back and edit this later.

 

I have a EEEpc and it is wonderful. I got the 4 gb EEEpc with 512mb of ram. It came installed with a intel mobile processor. It has very nice web cam imbeded in the top and the pictures are clear. If you drop this baby it is just fine. You cannot drop a traditional laptop and expect it to run just fine. There are tons of tutorials on linux on the internet. But this little laptop came with a very informative manual. It has built in dictionary calculator, screen capture, Science, planetarium, Math,language and web lessons. It has Paint, media player, music manager, photo manager, Voice manager and sound recorder. There are tons more stuff on this EEEpc. I
I am using the EEEpc right now to browse online and am listening to my favorite music on it while I am browsing. Yes it is diferent than windows but it is a marvelous size especially for traveling. I use mine instead of sitting at the desktop. It is far lighter to carry and to have in my lap. I have a tablet gateway laptop that I use for adobe media editing exclusively now since I got this one for all my other computer needs. I use this EEEpc exclusively here at home and while traveling. I am online with it now as I surf through Afterdawn and the pages load instanttneously, I have 5 tabs open too! It comes with quite number of games preinstalled on it and you can install more if you like. For the internet, games and writing poetry it takes the place of bulky slow windows perfectly. None of the redundent files to shuffle through before a page loads. This EEEpc turns off and on in an instant and I have so far never gotten a error message or a frozen screen. I have had this EEEpc for 5 months now and learning to use it has been fun and relatively easy especially in lue of the fact that there are parts of windows I have never figured out and I have used windows for more than 10 years. No I did not know MS Dos but it was not hard to get the hang of it with the EEEpc tutorials that are avalible online.
Try it you might like it! I am going to install linux on my desktop so I can boot both linux and windows simultneously. Windows is probably gonna hate that! hehehe I have heard of many people who have both linux and windows on thier desktop and yes on thier EEEpc also.(the manual you get with this pc explins how to instll windows on it. Oh and it hs 3 usb ports one flash card slot, earphone and speaker ports, phone line and wired or wireless internet access. You can even hook it up to a externl monitor if you want a bigger screen. I am not going to dirty my sweet EEEpc with a windows install. It is perfect just the way it is.
Sprinks

 

Hi Lynne,
Yes, I have just gotten one. VERY easy to use...icon driven so couldn't be easier. Love it. It is not to replace my regular laptop though...the keyboard is the only issue I have with it, but since the screen is only 7 inches, I expected a cramped keyboard. But it's fine.

 

What do you think of the upgraded os? I'm impressed by this little machine.