2.5 Years

Man, a lot has happened these past coupla years. It's hard to believe that my last post was so long ago... Anyhoos, on to pertinent informations; I knuckled down and bought an Eee PC. I was pondering the purchase of said thing for quite some time, but I never really had cashbucks with which to buy it. Thanks to my shiny Tax refund, G.W. bought me a shiny new sub-laptop that continues to blow me away. Firstly, the default interface that was setup by the fine folks over at ASUS is mighty slick for those who don't have any familiarity with Linux. Everything just works(tm) and I could easily see buying something like this for the technically challenged. Of course, I'm not technically challenged, and immediately began taking the system apart. I booted into "advanced desktop mode" which is a slimmed down version of KDE. Again, things ran smooth and easy for me there. I was fairly pleased with the default Xandros install, but once I tried to augment the system with more apps the flaws became apparent. The Xandros folks make their monies by selling subscriptions to their software, which, besides providing support, also gives access to their repositories. I wasn't entirely repositoryless, because after a very brief stint on eeeuser, user-created repos were available. However, while they were decently comprehensive, they still lacked some packages I needed. I also took the time to install the build-tools chain in an effort to just compile the software I desired, but that created more issues than I was looking for. All said, I decided to run my stalwart warhorse that is Slackware. I could not have been happier with the performance. The solid state drive loads quickly and effeciently, there's a nice third-party kernel package compiled for the Eee, and compiling programs once again became easy and intuitive (as easy and intuitive as it can get, I suppose). The performance of the laptop is excellent. It's not at fast as my dual-proc desktop, but you'd hardly notice when using it. This machine has very quickly ascended to my primary machine with the exception of music and video playback (a total of 12Gb of storage is to blame for that). This machine clips at speeds that easily rivals my old laptop, a 2.2Ghz celeron. I mean, I'm using compiz-fusion at smooth and effortless speeds. The resolution seems like it would turn folks off from using it, but I can hardly get enough (and my vision isn't that great.. I'm supposed to be wearing glasses right now). All in all, this is one nice machine. I bought a portable DVD player case for it, which works quite well, holding headphones, wireless mouse, and the power adapter. I now have full internet capabilities anywhere, I love it. That's pretty much it on the tech front. I'll try to post in here more often now that I have endless internet access. -Dave