DISQUS

If it lives up to it's name, I'll certainly be keenly interested.

To be frank, anyone who would want to use Linux for audio production is insane.

Lolz! The Recycler virus was going around my university campus for ages. Pretty embarrassing to have it show up in computers straight out of the factory.

In Australia, even though the HP Mini-Note has barely arrived here, the EeePC has already had something of a price drop. A well known website here called "Catch of the Day" has been flogging off 701 4G at $330AU a couple of times in the past two weeks. I bought one the first time they offered it.

Don't know where those guys got a hold of a buttload of cheap EeePCs, but it seems to indicate that there's not a supply shortage of them anymore. (They only have a lousy 10Wh battery, though)

UPDATE: Turns out I did not pay the Ubuntu EEE team enough credit. It does not in fact freeze during the install. It's just that it takes a couple of minutes to do something, so it just *looks* like it's frozen.

Lesson learned: A watched pot never boils. When booting up from the USB stick, go make a sandwhich and come back when you're done.

I would still reccommend using the Unetbootin method to get a bootable USB stick rather than the unecessarily difficult method the ubuntu EEE team use, though.

Hmm, that's not a bad idea. I am a little nervous about performing such an update (I killed my xorg once with an apt-get update) but at least the procedure for installing from USB seems much more user friendly.

So far I am not loving this thing.

I got an EeePC today (finally!) and figured I'd install this on it, since I wanted Ubuntu on it.

Instead it's been a living nightmare. The Ubuntu Eee people have assumed that you have a desktop running Ubuntu. I don't, so this annoyed me incredibly. I tried running their directions using an Ubuntu LiveCD but it didn't work.

Trying to get it to boot from USB was frickin' impossible until I went to the official Ubuntu helpsite and used Unetbootin like a sensible person.

Now it would actually boot, however, it crashed within 10 seconds of X loading up.

We really need a poll for what EEE optimised Ubuntu variant is less of a flaming PITA to use. Or at least a reccommendation along those lines.

That could make sense. I was assuming that was the output from a VGA-out port to a TV capture card or something.

Didn't even know there was screen capture software for Linux.

Can't say I'm terribly impressed by it. If even the GUI runs at an appalling frame rate, I'd say they've bitten off more than they can chew in the "make it look pretty" department.

Are they honestly trying to pass this off as 'lightweight'?

Actually, I finally got a date. August. Freakin' August!

You know, I'm getting mighty tired of things showing up in Afghanistan earlier than they do in this country.

Well, to hell with this, I'm just going to get a regular back-breaking laptop. Everything 15 inch is being fire-saled anyway.

Meanwhile, Australia remains the technological butt monkey of the developed world, with HP Australia yet to officially indicate that they've yet bothered selling the thing here.

I believe there are only two words fitting for this occassion: Aww, yeah!

Ah, plagiarism. It's not just for students anymore!

I'd love to know where they had that meeting: "OK, instead of doing a photo shoot, let's just photoshop a royalty-free image containing a competitor's product to include ours".

Lookin' GOOD! I think I might end up going for one of these instead of the mini-note.

In all honesty, I think this was for the best.

But I want the pink one!

That's a pretty tasty deal, at any spec level!

The big question that remains - how ergonomic is the keyboard? If it's anywhere near as good as the one on the Mini-Note, I might end up getting one of these instead.

Also not a very fair comparison because ASUS actually put a modicum of effort into the Linux OS on their ultraportable.
(But then, this is meritocratic unfairness, which is the best kind of unfairness)

The problem is these deals always mean XP home, and I hate that because I can't fix up the security policies how I like.

I must admit that when I first heard of the mini-note coming out with Linux I was quite willing to give it a try. But as we all know, HP failed and failed hard on that account.

Given what I am presently learning about batteries in class, and how weedy the power supply of the EEEPC is, it doesn't surprise me at all that plugging in a much higher capacity than would have been designed for is causing this sort of catastrophic failure.

Power systems are one of those areas of electronics that suffers from "Anything I don't understand is simple and easy" syndrome. A good, stable, non-explosive power supply is actually a damn tricky thing to accomplish and it's pretty easy to screw things up by randomly changing certain variables. (I'm pretty confident that the higher capacity battery I put in my MP3 player does not in fact charge fully because the factory charging control was probably preset for a 1700 mAh battery)

Mmmmm! Pink netbook!

Damn, this makes the decision even more difficult. Wait for an Isiah-Spec Mini Note that can (probably) run EVE Online, or get a deliciously fruity MSI Wind?

(It's a quirk of mine that I like to accessorize with pink, girly looking things despite looking like a lumberjack. Also, I figure a pink laptop is MUCH less likely to be stolen)

Fair cop, Brad! Didn't ASUS say they were going to fix their low capacity battery goof several weeks ago? I think you even wrote a post on this site about that.

Yes, it would be worse. VIA C7 processors are significantly slower than Celerons.

Sorry, no hardware acceleration for the VIA Chrome 9. I'm in contact with one of the key developers for X drivers for VIA chipsets (VIA's most infamous detractor - libv) and aware of the horrors he has to go through in order to get anything functional (VIA's 'support' in this area mainly consisting of random and sporadic drops of binary, not source code, which he then has to painstakingly reverse engineer in order to get something functional). Unless we get a tide of users harassing VIA for proper Linux support, they'll just continue their usual strategy of giving insincere support and then astroturfing like mad to pretend they're 110% behind Linux.

(Sorry if I sound like a FUD merchant. But I really want the HP 2133 to work, but right now a fire needs to be lit under HP and VIA so they get their act into gear.)

I'm pleasantly surprised! I was expecting the hard drive and VIA processor to be a handicap for startup times, but it looks like it pretty much has parity with a full speed EEE.