Eee PC - OpenAfter some consideration and waiting until it was stocked at a local vendor, I bought an Eee PC. Although my MacBook is pretty compact, I wanted a machine that I can use for calendaring, checking mail, and browsing. Since my phone does not offer these options, and are not that cheap without a new subscription, the Eee seemed to be a good choice. I opted for the non-surf variant with 4GB of flash storage an 512 MB RAM.

The standard Xandros-based distribution seems to be user-friendly and snappy. I was surprised to see that even OpenOffice.org booted up fairly quickly. However, I do not agree with some of the policies of Xandros (yes, I know, by buying the Eee, I paid the Xandros tax), and I prefer a system that is easy to customize for my own needs. Since the Debian community has worked hard on making Debian work well on the Eee PC, and provides an excellent Wiki page. The installation was a straight forward Debian-testing netinstall (the Eee doesn't boot from my 8GB USB memory stick, but 512MB and 1GB works fine). One of the upsides is that a driver for the wireless NIC is included in the default install, as well as some useful ACPI scripts to get the special keys of the Eee PC working. Virtually the only thing that I needed to change was the X configuration for touchpad scrolling.

Eee PC - ClosedI was a bit worried that the small screen would not be comfortable to use a normal desktop environment. So, I initially used the IceWM window manager with the GNOME network manager applet to get flexible en easy wireless connectivity. I ended up installing GNOME as well, and it turns that it mostly works fine with the screen size/resolution, although some dialogs are too large, and take some guesswork to tab through properly. Another problem is that the battery/power applet does not work well, because the machine reports the battery state in percentage rather than mAh.

All in all, it seems to be a good purchase, but I haven't tried the battery time and some other things yet. But I did accidentally drop it on the floor, and it still works :).