{"id":408,"date":"2009-04-19T21:04:01","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T04:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/?p=408"},"modified":"2009-04-19T21:04:01","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T04:04:01","slug":"first-weekend-with-the-new-eeepc-some-random-observations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/?p=408","title":{"rendered":"First weekend with the new EeePC &#8211; some random observations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I expect to put up a real page detailing my setup here and how I get various things to work on it, but before I go to bed, here are some first impressions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The keyboard is, as I said, TINY.  However, it&#8217;s turning out not to be a problem for me.  I end up going at a little less that full speed on it, but I can still type plenty fast enough on it to be comfortable rather than impatient with it.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.archlinux.org\" target=\"_New\">Arch Linux<\/a> seems to be quite nice for a distribution that uses precompiled binaries&#8230;(Yes, I&#8217;m still a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gentoo.org\/main\/en\/about.xml\" target=\"_New\">Gentoo<\/a> fan&#8230;).  It&#8217;s a lot like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slackware.com\" target=\"_New\">Slackware<\/a>, except with a &#8220;real&#8221;, full-featured package manager.  There seems to be a nice selection of user-generated repositories for various purposes along with the official one, too (including ones for Eee PC 901-specific stuff.)<\/li>\n<li>So far, the wireless (802.11a\/b\/g\/n) on this thing seems amazing.  I&#8217;m getting a much stronger signal with it than ever got with any of the three different bits of wireless network hardware I tried with Igor (built-in wireless, Prism-based 802.11b PCMCIA card, and most recently USB dongle).<\/li>\n<li>GIGANTO-FONTS!  GTK+ applications &#8211; including Firefox &#8211; seem to have their own special places to define font sizes, I think &#8211; I had to modify &#8220;userChrome.css&#8221; to force the browser to use normal sized fonts rather than gigantic &#8220;RUN SPOT RUN, SEE SPOT RUN&#8221; &#8220;Easy-Reader&#8221; fonts on this screen.  I still run into a lot of sites that display in annoying giganto-fonts.  Liferea seems to have the same problem.  KDE (4.2.2) initially had the same problem, but so far I&#8217;ve only had to tell it once to use normal-sized (for this screen) fonts and all of the KDE-related applications are behaving so far.  KDE seems to run nicely on this system.<\/li>\n<li>Incidentally, the browser in question is the Firefox 3.1(\/3.5) Beta 3, compiled from one of the user-provided Arch packages.  So far it&#8217;s running great.<\/li>\n<li>Battery life is probably not outright AMAZING for people who have previously paid attention to maximizing battery life, but I do get 4-6 hours or so out of it, which compared to my previous lazy habit of demanding maximum performance and just carrying the power cord with me is really impressive to me.<\/li>\n<li>The built-in webcam works &#8220;out of the box&#8221; &#8211; without doing anything at all to configure it, I just installed mplayer and &#8220;mplayer tv:\/\/&#8221; immediately lets me use my computer as a $300 vanity mirror&#8230;more practical uses to follow later.  I&#8217;d love to design a periscope-like gizmo to hang on the edge of the screen such that the webcam would be recording what&#8217;s happening in FRONT of me, rather than recording ME.<\/li>\n<li>Sound configuration is confusingly simple.  I know that sounds strange, but the last two laptops I had displayed a bewildering array of volume and mute controls for the sound.  Bit just has an &#8220;out&#8221; volume control, a mute for the built-in speakers, volume settings for the two built-in microphones, and a central &#8220;capture&#8221; volume control.  I haven&#8217;t played with recording yet, so I&#8217;m not sure how the input controls relate to either the external microphone port or the built-in pair of microphones (stereo!), but playback seems to work fine.  I&#8217;ve already installed <a href=\"http:\/\/audacity.sourceforge.net\/\" target=\"_New\">Audacity<\/a>, so I should be equipped to play with it when I get time.  It&#8217;s slightly confusing that the master volume control is called &#8220;lineOut&#8221;, but only slightly&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>The 1024&#215;600 resolution usually works just fine and gives me plenty of space, but a few programs still seem to assume the screen is taller.  Part of this is really the Giganto-Fonts problem &#8211; most of the windows seem to fit on the screen just fine once the fonts are made to display at a normal size.<\/li>\n<li>Google Earth whines about the screen being &#8220;only&#8221; 600 pixels high, and at the moment the bottom of the window ends up where I can&#8217;t see it, but other than that it seems to run fine.  Given that this is the only application I use at the moment that actually needs real 3D acceleration, this is good news to me.  Once I figure out how to set a default window size for Google Earth and cure ITS GigantoFonts problem it ought to be perfectly usable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The verdict so far:  &#8220;Bit&#8221; is a ridiculously concentrated piece of portable computing power.  The ability to easily carry a device like this that gives me a full-powered computer and internet connection made want to dig out my DVD&#8217;s of &#8220;Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex&#8221;.  I also need to install some speech synthesis so I can make it say &#8220;Yes&#8221; and &#8220;No&#8221; in the proper voice-synthesizer tone&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>More to follow&#8230;but now, bedtime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I expect to put up a real page detailing my setup here and how I get various things to work on it, but before I go to bed, here are some first impressions: The keyboard is, as I said, TINY. However, it&#8217;s turning out not to be a problem for me. I end up going &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/?p=408\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">First weekend with the new EeePC &#8211; some random observations<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,13,21],"tags":[472,469,79,451,471,470],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-nerdity","category-me-me-me","category-play-with-it","tag-anime","tag-eee-pc","tag-internet","tag-netbook","tag-portable","tag-tron"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":411,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions\/411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}