For our upcoming Scotland trip I decided to invest in a travel computer rather than lugging around my 10lbs. laptop. I went with the EEE PC 900HA. This system came with Windows XP Home edition pre-installed.
The first thing I did was upgrade it to dual boot with Ubuntu. The system booted up properly under Ubuntu, but it had a few quirks that had to be fixed. The system default had the webcam turned ‘off’ for power conservation. I also lost functionality to my wireless card, and my function keys no longer worked.
I did some more digging around and discovered 2 other flavors of Ubuntu that I thought I’d play around with instead. One was dubbed “Easy Peasy” and the other, which I decided to use, was Ubuntu – EEE. This ditribution had some extra tweaks necessary for the EEE PC. I was having a difficult time figuring out how to uninstall the first version of Ubuntu that I had installed, so I started clean and formatted my hard drive, waxed XP, and reinstalled Ubuntu EEE as an Ubuntu-only machine. This fixed some of the issues including the smaller screen size issues I was experiencing, and also added a shift-lock icon to the screen. (No LED on the shift lock button on this system)
There were still some necessary issues that had to be overcome, including adding a script to control the camera.
I’m still trying to figure out how to get my Logitech USB headset working for use with Skype. No luck yet. Not exactly plug-n-play. Wireless seems to work fine now. No other major issues have been discovered.
What I like about this system and Ubuntu:
- Easy access to open-source software and applications from the Synaptic Package manager.
- Easy to figure out GUI
- Command line control
- Portability: Size and weight
- Video performance is better than my HP Pavilion dv2000
- Long battery life 3.5-4 hours
- Price – really nice mini-computer for 300 bones
What I do not like:
- No way to run Google Earth (Although I have not tried it using Wine yet)
- I miss my Adobe Suite. Gimp was clunky to install and does not always run (still working on this issue)
- No way to easily add my images to my Smugmug.com acount. (I use to use Adobe Bridge for this which was a real snap)
- Had to uninstall and reinstall Firefox and Flash in order to see videos in Youtube. This was a strange issue that took me a long time to figure out.
- No iTunes – still have not researched my alternatives for working with files on my iPod
Helpful site for fixing EEE issues: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes
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