new geek toy asus eee 701

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congrats Vexx!

Thanks.

BTW: http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=1263 I like this, seems like they are beginning to copy that idea of getting a cheap, small laptop and preloading it with Linux.

I haven't looked, but I think that the SSD is soldered on. I was told that the RAM is replaceable by some people and other say it isn't. I haven't looked in mine.

Mine is the 2G surf and has 2GB SSD and 512MB RAM. I wiped the original linux and installed XP on it. Then I loaded 3CX (which is a PBX VOIP switch similar to asterisk) and it seems to run OK.

In order to do that, I had to do a minimal install on it and then I had to disable page file use. The page file does two things. It prematurely burns out the SSD with continuous swapping and writing and it also wastes valuable disk space. With only XP and also using disk compression, I had 800MB to spare. When I added the 3CX software and all of its components, that number dropped to about 200MB. With only real memory and no swapper memory, the unit works pretty good. I was trying to simultaneously run a Spybot Search and Destroy scan and that was just too much of a memory drain on it and the app crashed with a "Out of memory" error.

I should point out that where you load the OS from is irrelavent as far as SSD burnout. These devices can be read an infinite number of times. The limitations is when they are written to.

Having said that, I installed Puppeee Linux to a 256MB USB stick and can boot with that when I need to. I have been using that for making Linux Tarball backups of the NTFS drive system on the Asus. In any event, I do recommend making a puppee linux USB flash drive just to have around for emergencies.

My conclusion is that while I like the 2G, I think a model with 4Gb SSD and 1Gb RAM would be a better choice for XP. The virtual memory swap file should still be disabled though. There is no reason to slow the computer down when you have plenty of real RAM.

So, it's been long since I used XP but I think it is possible to change the location of the page file, could use an external USB disk to keep the life of the SSD.

You can move the page file, yes. What you cannot do is put it on removable media. I tried.

What you can do is set a bit in removable media, such as USB drives, that makes them appear to be internal. I'll try again.

You can remove the page file all together in XP. It still seems to have a private, and much smaller, page file for the kernel, but its only about 20 MB. Anyhow, XP runs surprisingly well with no page file. You just can't open too many apps at once thats all.

ill assume you can disable paging in linux as well

i want one, thought im still trying to think of something i could use it for, ill probably need one next year when they will be a bit cheaper/better but its a real effort not to pick one up whenever i see them

mouapp, there's a $89 dolars one, I think in Engadget I saw a review (and yeah, at that price it sucked).

Yes. In fact, I used Ubuntu for a year without realizing that my swap was turned off. The machine is 2.0 ghz and 2 gigs of ram, but i've never ran out. What had happened, as far as I know, is that when I resized my partitions after my first working install of Ubuntu I actually erased my swap and made a new one, but it had not be set as permissible to use in fstab.

Its also possible in debian distros to set a swap file, freeing up one partition(But I cannot think of a reason to have more than 4 partitions. Even then I could put them in extended partitions.

For example, the default Linux in the Asus has it disabled by default.

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I hate the default distro they included, it is amazingly hard to install new software without risking breaking the setup.

So, I am downloading "ubuntu eee", perhaps It'll finish tomorrow's morning, I'll give you the gossip as to how things went. If something doesn't work, I'll still can try "Mandriva Spring 2008 One" (Big Linux distro with OFFICIAL support for the EEE 701) or Puppeee (which I think would be very nice since puppy is an awesomely fast distro, but I know it is a little hard to install new software on puppy, so I am avoiding it)

I downloaded eeeBuntu and then I read the minimum system requirements which were 2.1 Gb SSD. That kind of messes up the works when you only have a 2G. I have puppeee on a USB flash drive and LOVE it. Its really a hot distro.

I just wish I knew enough about Linux to make use of its full potential. Puppeee is not as robust as regular Ubuntu, but it does an awful lot considering how small it is.

ok, initial thoughts:

* The ubuntu netbook remix interface is nice, though I hate its "title bar" and I have no idea how to change that so it looks decent.

* Webcam works.

* certain apps are not adapted to the small resolution (for example the appearance applet)

* Comes with some gtk themes that are very good for these things, light and don't use as much space as human/clearlooks/murina/etc. So I am using them.

* Lame bug with the repos, (Don't get why they called this version gold) Had to fix manually using their wiki, got scared since at first it appeared it can't use ubuntu's repos and that would suck, hard.

* Installed doom (prboom), it has the same bug as in hardy that requires you to either install timidity or run it with -music (this is fixable) but it also has a new bug in which the mouse cursor is still visible when playing in full screen, apart from that, doom is excellent for the eee since it was made for resolutions as small as that, and 900 Mhz was a luxury back in the time ...

* I wish that by pressing the home icon you would make the remix launcher appear, I think it is possible but will have to research on that later.

* It comes with no games whatsoever, but you can install any game from the ubuntu repos or that has an ubuntu hardy .deb, so that's not a problem unless you can't find internet.

* I haven't tested wireless yet.

* The remix interface is very good, if only it was more customizable I would actually hack my main computer to use it.

* boots way faster than I thought, hearing horror tales about very long booting when you are not using the default xandros.

* Suspend works (though not sure how much energy that actually saves) Hibernate doesn't - this could because I did not make a swap partition, planning to buy myself a cheap USB drive where I could add a swap (you can actually enable swap after boot)

Vex, I saw a theme where someone compressed the layout of popup menus like appearance. I'll have half a look for it.

You can look at/download deb packages at http://www.getdeb.net/

www.gnome-look.org may help you find some tight themes too. There are several sites like it dedicated to various 'nix themes.

wireless works, I think, well it is able to list all the networks that are around, now if I could actually find a network to which I could connect and begin browsing the net...

I managed to make the home button show remix's launcher, just had to do a key binding to 'show desktop'.

What really, really, blows is that for example none of the n methods to change volume is able to disable prboom's sound.

Anyone interested in an EEE PC 1000H at $498 living in Australia go to http://www.catchoftheday.com.au/index.php TODAY ONLY. That's $200 below RRP.

Erm.... "prboom -nosound"?