Asus Eee

A few weeks ago I still had some money left over from Christmas and decided to spent it on a new gadget and I'm really satisfied with what I got: the Asus Eee.

It comes with Linux preinstalled but of course I need Gentoo on there. That was pretty easy after hooking a USB HDD up to it and installing from there (since there is no optical drive). I furthermore use said USB drive to run the Portage tree, as well as most of /var/tmp and the kernel sources. This keeps the system small at around 1.8Gb, leaving about the same free for /home and decreases writes to the 4Gb SDD when compiling, etc.

I'm currently running Gnome and it's pretty fast on that machine, there is no feature I'm really missing. However I'm really looking forward to KDE 4.1 since the Zoom function in kwin/plasma would be a real blessing for the small height of the screen, which can be just a few pixels too small for things like Evolution. I'm not willing to switch yet due to the panel size (maybe that's already fixed in 4.0.2) and missing PIM in 4.0, since I don't want to support 3.5 and 4.0 on that small a disk.

Since I'm a fan of the neo layout I wanted to flip the keys on this machine, which was a tad harder than on the Macbook. The forums suggest peeling from one side to the other but my keys were really stuck on tight. What worked for me was lifting them by the bottom and using a paperclip to separate the key from the hook on the right side. Since several keys are smaller than normal, typing the characters d,y and j is a bit tricky but it's not too hard. Since they wouldn't fit where they would have gone otherwise, I just placed those three keys over ü,ö,ä.

Overall, it's a really neat little machine. I love how light and small it is, which make it really great for carrying it everywhere. Hopefully the next post will happen quicker than the last one; maybe through the Eee from a faraway place.