YGingras^.net

I'm typing this on an Asus EEE 1000 HE laptop. You've probably read a lot of good things on it and I have to say that it's definitely a very nice little laptop.

Since last October, I was using an MSI Wind U100 and before that I was on a Thinkpad X61. I love little laptops with big batteries. I'm now typing with the computer on lap, very reclined sideway on my couch. That's not the best position to code or to work on a graphical design but somehow I really like it for writing prose, that is, blogging and answering emails. When the summer will be back, I look forward to type using the very same position but in my hammock this time. You can't do that if your computer is heavy or if you need to carry a power cord around.

I don't work much on the road. It happens that I put my laptop in my backpack and that I hit the road with my motorcycle. When it happens I end up working from a café in a remote town or from the side of a lake in a provincial park but that is far from my typical usage. Nope, nothing that fancy. I'm just a lazy bum with a hammock.

I switched from the X61 to the Wind because I moved to a new job; it was my consulting tool: lots of power in an easy to carry package. Compared to the X61, the Wind is kind of a joke. It has a lot less CPU power, no docking stating, not LED to highlight the keyboard when typing in the dark and not even a very good battery. The X61 can last six hours on the battery and with the big 90W power supply typically attached to the dock, it will top up an empty battery in only one hour. The screen of the X61 is a lot bigger without making the laptop too bulky, and the keyboard is just great. But the X61 costs five time the price of the Wind.

I went with the Wind because I wanted roughly the same experience without spending too much. The six cells battery gives four hours and a half of autonomy and most of all, the Wind was the only netbook at the time with the right shift key on the correct side of the arrow up one. I was a bit disappointed by the build quality and by the abysmal performance of the Atom processor but considering the price that I paid, it served me extremely well. I could simply leave it in my backpack all the time and more than once I was able to pull it out during a heated argument at the brew pub to prove my point. Had it been a very expensive piece of hardware, I'm not sure I would have put it on a table full of half empty glasses and surrounded by half drunk geeks arguing at full throttle.

When the news came out that there would be a new EEE netbook with a better battery and with an better keyboard, it was hard for me to resist. It only took a first hand account from a friend to convince me. I knew it was the laptop that I needed for the upcoming conferences. The battery would be good enough for a full day of note taking and the keyboard was reportedly impressive.

Now that I got mine, I have to say that the battery is indeed very dependable and that the keyboard exceeds my expectations. The keys are firm and tactile; they give up to the pressure with a sharp break in resistance and they push your finger back up once you reach the bottom. The build quality is generally better that that of the Wind too. Plastic case feels stronger as there is no flex when I type or when I unfold the LCD lid. I get seven hours of battery life with wifi activated but to get everything to work under GNU/Linux required some tweaking.

Here is want I did. The first thing I did was to clone the hard drive that I had on the Wind. Both are 160 GiB so it was just a simple copy with dd. I run Kubuntu 8.10 with lots of stuff installed but not a lot of customization to the core OS. I noticed in powertop was that both bluetooth and the webcam were generating lots of interrupts so I disabled both in the BIOS. Don't do that. For some strange reason, the wifi won't work if the webcam is disabled in the BIOS; bluetooth doesn't seem to matter. I later found out that I had the "motion" package installed, which is some kind of motion sensor system. After removing motion, the webcam got back into sleep mode without problems.

I'm running the ubuntu-eeepc kernel. It includes very important drivers such as the one for the multi-touch touchpad. The supplied instructions are very good but I got the 2.6.27-11 kernel instead of the 2.6.27-3 one. I also got the kernel headers as I was recommended to use the latest wireless drivers, which have to be built by hand.

   sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.27-11-eeepc
   sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.27-11-eeepc

After a reboot on my new kernel, I was ready to build the latest wifi drivers:

   tar -xvf compat-wireless-2009-03-15.tar.bz2
   cd compat-wireless-2009-03-15
   make -j 2
   sudo make install

After a last reboot, both wifi and sleep work as expected.

I'm glad that I made the switch to the EEE 1000 HE and I look forward to the note taking at the conferences. I hope that the second part of this post will help other 1000 HE owners to get running with Ubuntu 8.10 but most of all, I hope that the first part will convince those without netbooks that it's about time that they too start enjoying typing from a couch or from a hammock.