[Gloucs] GlosLUG February meeting

[Andrew Oakley]

aecooper at coosoft.plus.com wrote:
> Andrew, I think I am loosing the battle wrt not buying a 
> EEEPC :-).

I'm delighted with my Eee 901. Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD, 5-8 hour
battery life, 9" 1024x600 screen, usable keyboard, usable trackpad and
Bluetooth for those "oh, I don't have access to WiFi here... time to
connect over GPRS/3G via my mobile phone" moments. Given that O2 provide
unlimited 3G/GPRS for only 8 quid on top of any monthly phone bill, I
see little point in paying for a separate 3G SIM/dongle service; so I
rate Bluetooth over integrated 3G. You also get a webcam.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/17/review_eee_pc_901/page6.html

Available for 250 quid ish if you search around. Get the Linux preloaded
version, even if you plan to re-install your favourite distro, as the MS
Windows version ships with less SSD storage. I got mine from Amazon for
about 260 quid inc. postage, but LambdaTek have them for 240+postage
(I've used Lambda before and recommend them, since their returns process
is painless if you are unfortunate enough to need it; plus, they're in
Oxford and reasonably commute-able from Glos if the worst should
happen).

http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?prodID=B129611

However I can appreciate that some people might:

* Not want Bluetooth, 'cos they never leave town and never leave wi-fi
range, or have another good reason to never want to connect over their
mobile phone.

* Find the keyboard a bit small on the 901. Fair enough, try one of the
many alternatives, but be aware you'll be hard pressed to match the
battery life. My dad has an MSI Wind, and the keyboard is much easier to
use; fifty quid cheaper but the battery life is pants and you get a real
HDD rather than an SSD. His needs were a cut-price laptop for use around
the home and at university (him=professor); my needs were more
portability and road-warrior.

The whole point of a netbook is genuine portability. If you need to
tether to a charger after 2 hours, that's not portable IMHO.

You'll also need a 2GB or larger USB key or SD card, to install your
distro of choice.

> I have been googling and there seem to be two
> favourites, the one you chose Ubuntu Eee/Easy Peasy
> and Eeebuntu. It seems from the postings the latter
> is more popular. Did you look into Eeebuntu by any chance?

At the time I first looked, Eeebuntu didn't have the Netbook Remix
Interface - or at least, it was very much in alpha/beta. Ubuntu-Eee
seemed to have always included it.

My minimum requirements, which were met by all of Eeebuntu, Ubuntu-Eee
and EasyPeasy, were:

* Ubuntu based. To paraphrase, Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning
"I want the ease of administration of Debian but with more desktop GUI
focus".

* Array kernel - optimised for the Intel N270 chip and most common
netbook drivers, with lots of crud removed, resulting in fast boot time.
http://www.array.org/ubuntu/

* Availability of Eee-control, a tray applet which allows switching
on/off of WiFi, Bluetooth and webcam (eg. to save battery life), and
configuration of hotkeys.
http://greg.geekmind.org/eee-control/

* Inclusion of Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface.

I chose Ubuntu-Eee over the others because:

* Ubuntu-Eee seemed to have more and better-organised community
documentation ( www.ubuntu-eee.com/wiki ) than Eeebuntu. Eeebuntu seemed
to just have a forum, no proper docs at all. I do not equate "number
forum posts" with "quality of support". Having said that... try
www.googlefight.com and compare "eeebuntu vs. easypeasy" and "eeebuntu
vs. ubuntu-eee". Eeebuntu loses both by quite a large margin, which is
even worse when you consider that EasyPeasy is just Ubuntu-Eee v3.

* It was based on an Ubuntu LTS release (8.04); I prefer to stick to
Long Term Support releases, as you only need to upgrade every 3 years. I
dislike upgrading every 6 months or so. Eeebuntu and EasyPeasy are based
on 8.10 which has only 18 month support and require an upgrade every 6
months. I have better things to do with my life. If there's a sliding
scale from 0=Stabilty and 5=Toys then I'm about a 2. When I talk about
stability, I also mean the "stability of the user interface" and not
just the stability of the machine. I don't want to have to re-learn how
to set up Bluetooth and 3G every six months, regardless of how much
slicker the new interface is, or how much better the new version is
alledged to work.

* It Just Worked. It was the first one I tried, it provided everything I
wanted, and I saw no reason to look any further.

Andrew Oakley
Head of Software Development
Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)
95 Promenade, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire GL50 1HZ
T 01242 211460  F 01242 211122  W www.hesa.ac.uk

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