DIY Planner - Writing Tools - Comments

Resistance Crumbling

Rocket Jones — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:50:00 -0400

My daughter has used her eeePC now for an entire year of college and still loves it, while I've been resisting the urge to pick one up for myself.

She's had two hiccups. Firstly, her wireless setup was very difficult because her school uses an obscure protocol, which is apparently standard-ish amongst US colleges. She needed help from the tech support people at her school to figure it out, but they got it going and even managed wireless printing, which was an unexpected bonus.

The second hiccup happened when a software upgrade crashed in the middle of the update, rendering the wee beastie non-startable. By pressing F5 during the boot sequence, you get an option screen that can completely reset your machine to original condition for just such an occasion. Works great. Fortunately, she had current backups!!!

The eeePC can make an impression as well. She attended a conference in the Spring, doing multiple interviews for Summer jobs (she works in theater). She set up the eeePC to open directly to her online portfolio, which the interviewers could then see. She'd also hand them a one-page summary with her URL prominently displayed so they could go back and review it again later if they wanted. She got a lot of favorable comments on the setup, and more than one interviewer referred to her as "mini laptop girl" as a distinguishing characteristic.

I really want my own eeePC, but at this time it would be just to play with. That's a fair bit of money to spend on a toy, and the new model is more expensive, even overpriced, IMO.

...and after three more months...

Jon Rutherford — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:50:59 -0400

Thought I'd update my original "after one month" comment to reflect my feelings about the EeePC here in the middle of July, a little over four months since I acquired it.

I still admire and appreciate its ultra-solid construction every time I open it (with some difficulty -- which is good, since it's virtually impossible for it to open on its own while it's under your arm in the espresso stand line, for example, or if you drop it -- in which case it will most likely emerge both still shut and undamaged, amazing).

The display continues to impress me with its clarity and ease on my eyes. I thought my desktop 19-inch Princeton monitor was easy to look at, but now I actually prefer using the EeePC when I don't need all that screen space.

I loathe the built-in touchpad, though, and pretty much refuse to use it. A wireless mouse I found on eBay for about two dollars (that's right, $2) is so wonderful I lack words to describe it. Problem solved. (The "dongle" that goes into the USB slot on the EeePC even stows in the back of the mouse, and turns it off at the same time, when you want to wrap things up and move on.)

I generally do all my work (mainly, I admit, email, a spreadsheet, and browsing and doing research on the Web; I'm retired) in the living room on the EeePC and rarely even visit my desktop machine anymore. If I can fire myself up to get involved heavily in photography again (I hit a slump when I resigned from Flickr), then I'll do all photo editing on the desktop machine.

I would rate my satisfaction with the 701 at 9 on a scale of ten. I would probably rate the larger machine even higher, but I don't have any plan to get one, at this time.

Eee PC

selang1 — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:49:01 -0400

Love mine can use free wi-fi in my local bar while I wait for friends and most of our express buses have wi-fi too.
Great for on the move. Storage, I just use my cards and pen drives. It is a sweetie

Compiz???

jonglass — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:16:57 -0400

Wow... I hadn't thought about that! I can't use it either on my Mac, or my ancient Dell box, so I kind of forgot about that! But if you can run that on the eee.... hm.... I might have to have my son buy me the 901 while he's in the States this summer. ;-) (I fear the 10" is too big--and I _know_ the 701 is too small--my wife has one)

Thanks!

-Jon

Eee PC Desktop

dougj — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:07:40 -0400

I was using KDE when I had Xandros still installed, but now that I have Ubuntu on it, I'm using the latest Gnome with most of the bells and whistles. I actually find it fast enough for my purposes: mostly web and writing, plus the occasional movie in VLC, graphical touch-up in GIMP, or playing tunes from my iPod via Rhythmbox.

I've tweaked the interface for the smaller screen size, upgraded the memory to 1 GB, and nixed daemons that I don't need to have running all the time (e.g., Apache).

I've used icewm, fluxbox, wm, etc., on other computers but not this one, so I can't tell you how those perform here. However, even with Compiz --normally quite the hog-- the Eee PC is snappy enough not to bother me. Note that I haven't spent much time in Eclipse (all those tabs in the perspectives don't work well with a small screen size), so if that's your thing I have no advice.

Hrm. Guess I should test this rig hooked up to a larger monitor....

Hope this helps!

all my best,
dj

What DE/WM?

jonglass — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:46:44 -0400

Doug-

What desktop environ or window manager are you using on your eeePC? If Gnome or KDE, does it seem fast/snappy enough? How about KDE4?

If you've used others (icewm, lxde, fluxbox et al) I would be interested in your impressions on how well the run.

-Jon

Chandler?

jonglass — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:44:21 -0400

I just downloaded Chandler Organizer onto my Mac (haven't tried it on my Linux box yet), and it looks like it's more notes-oriented, while not forgetting the calendar side, and that seems robuse enough, also. I would give it a look:

LINK

-Jon

Thanks for the tips!

Rocket Jones — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:01:11 -0400

I'm going to drop her an email right now.

Newest Lightning

caligatia — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:00:07 -0400

I just checked and there's a new version of Lightning for Thunderbird. And it seems awesome so far. So your daughter might want to take a look at it, too. (In fact, I'm liking it better because of the page layout and the syncing with Google Calendar!)

Newest Evolution release

caligatia — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:52:07 -0400

I've got to say, the new version of Evolution is much improved. Your daughter might want to have a look.

I'll keep looking.

caligatia — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:31:50 -0400

Evolution is an Outlook-type app that does mail and contacts and to-do stuff and notes. Unfortunately the task lists and notes sections aren't robust enough for my tastes. Although, to be fair, I haven't tried the new version. I'll have to give it a look.

What I really want is for the Mozilla people to hurry up and finish upgrading the Lightning extension for Thunderbird. Thunderbird is the bestest mail client ever, and Lightning is a to-do and calendar add-on. It's just not very developed yet, but they're working on it. Hopefully they'll finish the new version soon.

Also, it would be nice if someone wrote a Palm conduit for Thunderbird once Lightning gets upgraded. Evolution syncs with the Palm, but the fields for the contacts are different from the Palm's and it drives me nuts. So I don't use it for my Palm. I keep a Windows partition, mostly to sync my Palm with the Palm Desktop.

Linux is wonderful for everything I do except for the organizer thing. If I was a good enough coder I'd try to make one, but I've never built a GUI. My programming experience is limited to command-line Unix (C and Perl, many years ago) and web scripting (mostly PHP, and it's been a while for that too). Sniff.

My daughter uses an eeePC

Rocket Jones — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:11:11 -0400

And cannot find an organizer for it either. She's been using Evernote on her desktop (Windows) and likes it a lot, but it's more of a Commonplace-type app than an organizer. It's near perfect for what she needs at the moment - college student - but there isn't a whole lot out there for unix.

tried and failed

Artbeast — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:05:58 -0400

I tried installing Ubuntu on my desktop but could not get the graphics drivers to work after fiddlin for 2 days so I gave up.

Arthur
www.renaissance-art.com

I disagree, at least a little.

caligatia — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:35:56 -0400

I use and love Ubuntu. But I have yet to find a good organizer for it. The best I've been able to do is lots of Tomboy Notes for stray information, and then regular dumps of my Palm contacts into Evolution. Bleah.

It's linux

brontide — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:13:26 -0400

Don't get me wrong, I eat Linux for breakfast since I've been working with it professionally for more than a decade.... but.....

Linux as a UI/desktop generally sucks. Linux as a PDA sucks worse. Sure it's some geeky goodness working with it, but at the end of the day the PDA functions still stink. Desktop is passable these days as long as you don't need to deal with word documents or deal with Pro Adobe products. The PDA functions will probably never really get worked out until Gears brings Google Calendar to the table.

I'm not saying it's impossible to get it into a workflow, but I have better things to do with my weekends.

D*I*Y Planner - Writing Tools - Comments

Resistance Crumbling

...and after three more months...

Eee PC

Compiz???

Eee PC Desktop

What DE/WM?

Chandler?

Thanks for the tips!

Newest Lightning

Newest Evolution release

I'll keep looking.

My daughter uses an eeePC

tried and failed

I disagree, at least a little.

It's linux

DIY Planner - Writing Tools - Comments