Asus EEE Pc — so much fun +

Got my baby this morning. Pearl colored, couldn’t wait till the black one becomes available in Croatia, God only knows when that’ll happen.

Once they become available in 8GB and with more RAM, I’m getting the black one, and surrendering this baby over to wife-to-be.

Untill then, I’ll be having fun compiling stuff over and over again, checking dependencies, RTFMing my ass off and generally having so much fun. This thingy is made to be tweaked to hell and back again. BTW, it fully boots in under 10 seconds. For now at least : )

So far, I’ve managed to:

  • Remember that the console is brought up with Ctrl + Alt + T. I was lost without it for the first 20 mins. Then I changed the default console to Konsole following a guide on the wiki. Thinking of trying another one since Konsole seems slowish to start. Restart X server with Ctrl + Alt + Backspace
  • Learn the hard way about Alt + click anywhere inside a window = drag it from that point onward. Using apps that weren’t designed for an 800×480 screen is painful. Very.
  • Get my cell phones hooked up via some crappy bluetooth dongle and actually get them to see the eeepc and vice versa. Next step was to get Dial-up networking working, so now I should be able to go online via the phone’s GPRS.
  • Build synergy and quicksynergy from sources and get them both working. Also a major PITA: first, stock eeepc doesn’t come with any sort of compiler. Or a good software repository for that matter. So I had to get those working first. Since I haven’t had much experience with Debian before, I learned a lot along the way and found out that I’ve wasted about 2 hours manually looking for stuff, when I could’ve just typed: sudo apt-get install build-essentials and magic happens and you get all that’s needed to compile stuff from sources. Yay!
  • Write my first blog post using this tiny little keyboard!

Pics and some other goodies coming soon hopefully. Need more time and less distractions from the real world dammit!

EDIT: Bleh, now I see that my blog looks wierd in Firefox 2.0.0.9 and 800×480 screen. Gonna try fixing that tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:44 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

11 Responses to “Asus EEE Pc — so much fun”

  1. sloser | February 22nd, 2008 at 11:26 am +

    ha, welcome to the debian world… apt get is your best friend. No more compiling, checking dependecies… just type apt get install and enjoy :)

    Try install synaptic on your baby… synaptic is searchable GUI for apt get.
    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticHowto

  2. zytzagoo | February 22nd, 2008 at 11:38 am +

    yo sloser! Thx for stopping by. Apt-get is über sweet once you have nice repos to choose stuff from, but this thing doesn’t by default. Synaptic was there too, however, as it’s just a (somewhat) nice GUI for the command line utilities, it suffered from the same problems: no quality packages were present.

    This thingy is based on Xandros, which I later discovered is in turn a fork of the main Debian distro (or was, at some point in time). Does this mean I can just use regular debian packages? Xandros on the other hand doesn’t officially support this Asus “fork”, and the only “official” repositories are lacking (to say the least).

    I’m in the middle of figuring out what the hell is “etch”, what’s the difference between dpkg and apt-get, is there a difference between i386 and i686 packages, and so on and so forth :) Fun times :)

  3. sloser | February 22nd, 2008 at 12:34 pm +

    as I know you can install ubuntu on eee.

    try find answers on http://groups.google.com/group/eeepc-zagreb

  4. zytzagoo | February 22nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm +

    Will do. How’s ubuntu different? What’s so special about it? A link will be more than enough :)

  5. sloser | February 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm +

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC

  6. seven | February 23rd, 2008 at 11:22 am +

    OMG! :) EEEPc = One laptop per geek child. :) We had huge discussion just the other day in the office about eee. Where did you get it, and WHY did you get it? With so _much_ ram, how can you even start 2 apps at the same time?

  7. zytzagoo | February 23rd, 2008 at 11:40 am +

    Why? Because you can upgrade the ram, and you can run more than one app no problem even with the stock setup — it’s linux after all ;)

    The thing is more fun than a stick — I’ll show you when we meet :)

  8. seven | February 23rd, 2008 at 10:12 pm +

    Beer kegs are waiting mate!

  9. Marko | February 27th, 2008 at 5:43 pm +

    Just got on in the other day, lovely stuff!

  10. Zax | March 8th, 2008 at 2:32 pm +

    still waitng for the damned black one. suppose enhanced expensive version will launch faster in croatia.

  11. Helmut | March 30th, 2008 at 7:19 pm +

    i got me the same EEE PC in December, but now the new models come out with “normal” screen size – http://www.eeepcdemo.com/news/new-asus-eee-pc-900-video-and-prices/
    so i’m starting to think may be to sell the old one :D