Sometimes, Apple rule.

[ibi sum]

> Yeah, the keyboard is the very bad part of the EEE and the Aspire's one
> looks a lot better.
>

Its really a lot, lot better .. for me anyway.  I can write code with
the Aspire1, whereas the EEEPC .. not so easy, or comfortable.  Last
night I wrote 2000 lines of code with the Aspire1, and its starting to
look like its going to be my Linux hacking/development machine for the
next 6 months ..

> How's the situation with the mouse buttons ? they have kind of a wierd
> position.

The position of the mouse buttons suck, its really a fact.  I have to
work out what to do about this ..

> And what distro do you run on it (unless you bought one with windows; arf
> arf arf)

Right now I'm putting up with the Linpus (worst distro name ever) that
came with it, if only because I feel sorta pervy (in a good way) about
learning yum when all my professional life these days is either
build-from-source or .deb pkg mgmt, and to be honest I'm not finding
it all that difficult to get over my RedHat bigotry in this instance;
all the important stuff installed easily enough (Inkscape, dev tools,
seq24, zynaddsubfx, sooperlooper, Audacity, etc.) and I have gotten my
code compiled and running easily enough.  One thing I do need to chase
down is how to get a RT- enabled kernel setup, thats a bit of a
nuisance.  But I like having an ultra-minimal config - certainly its
nice to be running xfce happily again, and the machine really does fly
along at doing what I need it to do, which right now is building
kernel modules and hacking on SVG-based user interfaces and related
documents.

One negative on the Aspire1 though: it only sees 1.5gigs of RAM, this
is a BIOS limitation, and the BIOS appears to be pretty much orphaned
in terms of support.  There was an upgrade recently, but it doesn't
address the arbitrary RAM limitation, alas .. just some power
management issues, which admittedly were good to have (longer battery
life==good).. but I hope the RAM limit goes away, coz I don't wanna
waste 512megs in the environment I'm using the Aspire1.

Either way though, you gotta appreciate the netbook revolution that is
pushing Linux into the hands of people who really stand to benefit
from using it these days.  I can't tell you how pleased I am to see
kids using netbooks, installing apps through synaptic, and having
ultra-clean, well-maintained systems for the price of a pair of Nikes'
.. to be honest it really makes me proud, especially when its mostly
teenage girls telling me about the features they love at the local
Saturn while I browse the netbook aisle, almost every week, to see
whats new..  quite a nice thing, maybe, about living in Vienna, is
just how computer literate the young folks seem to be.

> BTW. Ubuntu remix is WAY to hungry for decent use on the 701. I really like
> the concept but it's simply not made for something of that power level.

Well the guy who has my EEEPC now is quite happy with it, but that
might be because of the RAM upgrade, and actually I was helping him
out with it a little last night and sorta lusted after its goodies
(love the interface to be honest) again .. so I don't really agree
with you here.  I haven't found it to be a dog, actually.  How much
RAM you got?  2gigs in my ol' 701 and it is pretty pimp I have to say.
 No problems firing up Inkscape, a fat document or two, leaving
Audacity open in the background, running some torrents too, etc.  The
system load just gets managed quite nicely - though I would hate to
see how the same levelling would work with less RAM..

j.