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The Linux distillery The ASUS Eee Linux PC from the outside in
The Linux distillery The ASUS Eee Linux PC from the outside in | The ASUS Eee Linux PC from the outside in |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 16 December 2007 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Hitting the power button for the first time flashes several screens in quick succession displaying options to enter BIOS setup, an ASUS startup splash screen and then a brief period of nothingness – a gray screen with an X cursor. Within mere moments the Eee is fully operational. The total time from power on is easily measured in seconds. This is a testament to the solid state hard drive which, while lacking in space (being 4Gb total) is definitely swift and silent.Featured Whitepaper
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Here’s where things went a bit pear-shaped: despite the manual speaking of an initial setup wizard, My Eee started up without any login or EULA acceptance required. The diminutive screen proudly displayed a series of tab pages with bold application icons. It is a friendly interface free from intimidating and esoteric menus. There’s no confusion about how to get going. Beginning users can start browsing the web or writing e-mail or playing games within less than a minute from flicking the switch. It’s likely my Eee was already fiddled with by Myer staff in the store, who performed the intial setup themselves, or maybe this is genuinely how the Eee begins. If so, it’s pretty much a good thing; for the average punter the Eee is a clearly a no-nonsense device which doesn’t require any tech-savvy to operate. On the other hand, the lack of any initial setup process means there’s some tweaking to do. For starters, the clock shows the wrong time. Double-clicking calls up the date and time applet which reveals the time zone is set to New York. It’s a simple affair to adjust both the time zone and the clock. Additionally, my wireless network isn’t connected. This stands to reason because a secure key is required but there are some traps here. Oh, it begins simply enough; double-clicking the wireless icon lets you scan for wireless networks (none are discovered by default; you need to press Refresh to force a search.) Once a network has been found, you can inspect its properties and attempt to connect. This will undoubtedly fail on anything but the most open of networks. That’s where things go bad; disappointingly, you can’t do anything more here – such as enter a WEP key. You need to next double-click on a separate system tray icon to edit network properties. It’s in this network connections applet where you can set the details needed to connect to your wireless network. Whilst there, it’s also worth setting the start mode to “On boot” from the strange default of “Manual” (which would mean the wireless connection has to be explicitly started on each boot.) I have to be honest; I don’t like the hoops the Eee required here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for wireless networks to be automatically detected and the user prompted to fill in details if they opt to connect. And although it’s true I could figure it out pretty quickly, it does appear to fly in the face of how brash and unrepentantly friendly the display of application icons comes across. On first glance of the Eee you cannot help but think this is an easy-to-use system, but these little gotchas tarnish that perception. Onto more positive matters, the interface brings forth six tab pages – Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings and Favorites – loaded with meaningful applications. These include the usual suspects – Firefox (labelled “Web”), Skype, Open Office (labelled “Documents”, “Spreadsheets”, etc.), Amarok (labelled “Music Manager”), KDE tools and games and other items. Using these is an absolute doddle and performance is more than fine. (Perhaps if the screen were larger you might tend to run more programs at once, and then would notice a slowdown, but as it is, I found every program to run entirely satisfactorily on their own.) The system tray, in addition to network icons and the clock, holds handy shortcuts to shutdown the computer, call up usability tips (activated by a yellow smiley) and an "SOS" button to fire up the task manager (AKA KDE’s KSysGuard) to stop rogue processes in their tracks. That’s my first impressions of the ASUS Eee in a nutshell and what you can expect if you buy one too. With Christmas no doubt bringing many ASUS Eee’s to good boys and girls worldwide stay tuned for more. I’ll give the skinny on just how ASUS made their user interface. I’ll bring the good dope on what daemons are running under the hood. But to begin with, on Thursday, I’ll tell you how to recover your Eee back to factory settings, how to update it, how to call up a shell prompt and how to load on your own software. |
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