Unicap has an article on the Asus EeePC. “In spring 2007, Asus announced the EeePC, a low cost, small sized mobile computer, which is expected to be available to the public in October 2007. The system is equiped with a 900 Mhz ultra low power Intel CPU, a 7” LCD monitor, 512 MBytes of RAM and uses flash memory as permanent storage. On the software side, the system comes with a custom version of Xandros Linux preinstalled.”
Seeing it on top of that macbook makes me really want one. Great for travel and and budget friendly enough I wouldn’t care what happens if I just toss it in backpack etc
Still hard to believe this thing is real… Now I want a Wii and an Eee!
Specs-wise, they’re about the same (except for the screen and keyboard, natch).
Imagine, the portable Wii…
What’s that expansion slot above the SO-DIMM slot?
Is that the solid state storage? And I wonder what it can be replaced with?
Nice, mini pci-express slot.
The article is still being actively updated so check it for updates!
I’d install it NetBSD!!!
🙂
Haiku should boot in 8-10 seconds on this puppy. I may have to get one (if I can, I bet these will sell like Wiis, aka hotcakes.) The current 80 MB “distro size” of Haiku would leave plenty of room for other stuff. Of course Haiku still has some work before it is usable day to day.
But I can’t believe Xandros was taking up 2.7 GB! I’m sure they could slim that down. You’d think they would use one of the slimmer distros. Oh well.
It definitely should make a nice ultra portable system for when you are out and about.
>Haiku should boot in 8-10 seconds on this puppy.
Note that the 26s seconds is the time from power-on: it include the BIOS initialisation time..
That said, it’s not clear what the ‘first user interaction’ is: is-it a login manager or a desktop (and if so which desktop)?
Given such low figure, I’d bet that this is the login manager though.
>>Haiku should boot in 8-10 seconds on this puppy.
>Note that the 26s seconds is the time from power-on: >it include the BIOS initialisation time..
I’m booting 20-30 seconds on a ordenary P4, 1gb ram..
as it’s a flash disk this will be faster, perhaps not 8-10 but 15, like the good old days with P3 and BeOS
>That said, it’s not clear what the ‘first user >interaction’ is: is-it a login manager or a desktop >(and if so which desktop)?
Nop that would be to easy
I will probably by one when they are out if it’s under 300.
I presume it will run other distributions of linux?
i mean, surely being linux you could just copy the drivers and install them under a different distro (with same kernel version i guess).
This would be seriously cool. I may well end up buying one of these
I do know Mandriva is working on it…
Or at least I will still want one if they don’t keep adjusting the price upward and reducing the specs downward…
Also I wonder how well Win9x would perform on this machine? I imagine if fully patched with the various ‘unofficial’ update packs and Tihiy’s 98Revolutions pack it should look good and be functional at less than half the space Xandros wants!
–bornagainpenguin
PS: I know its the Intel GMA900 which makes the above a pipe dream, but I wonder if anyone’s managed to get the Win2000 WDM version of the driver to run on win9x? Oh well, even if Win9x is a dream there’s always Ubuntu and OSX86 to play around with!
<OFFTOPIC>
bornagainpenguin, your comment was interesting for OT reasons, where you mentioned the Win 9x stuff. You seem to know a bit on the subject and my gf’s laptop is lumbered with Win ME, which she has no intention of replacing and I do my best to keep in one piece now that MS have abandoned ME. Do you have any good links for helping Win9x systems stay “healthy” past EOL?
</OFFTOPIC>
Your best bet for Win9x systems would be to learn two addresses:
MSFN’s Win9x forum
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=8
Axcel216 / MDGx’s Max Speed WinDOwS…:
http://www.mdgx.com/
Together those two sites should help you piece your Girlfriend’s laptop back together! The Acel216 site has many of the patches you’ll need and the MSFN forums are chock full with more patches tips. More importantly the MSFN forums are where alot of this stuff gets developed!
–bornagainpenguin
PS: To be honest though I’d probably just install Win98SE and then put 98SE2ME on it.. Just be sure you have a good backup tool before beginning, like Acronis or Ghost!
Thanks! Will have a good ol’ swot over these on my day off. Maybe I can buy the poor old beast a bit more time. (The laptop that is, not the gf…)
EESH! I’d suggest that getting a Win2K GDI driver to run under 98 is all but impossible. I mean, it _might_ be possible (it’d require numerous hacks to the 9x kernel which can be done on 9x by hooking various function pointer tables to make it more or less NT kernel compatible)… however, the real magic would be getting the driver to run at all. Win9X display drivers are a strange amalgam of VXD and a 16bit display driver. Yup, 9x’s display drivers are 16bit DLLs. I suspect most deliberately flip to 32bit mode as soon as they can but they have to maintain some 16bit code mostly to be compatible with junk like older versions of Quicktime (which actually patch the display driver code directly… evil!)
Notice I specifically said WMD drivers. As heretical as it might seem to you I have had to use Win2000 WDM drivers in my Win98SE install before and have had good results depending on the drivers.
I’m just trying to see if anyone has tried this with the GMA900 drivers on Win98SE?
–bornagainpenguin
…and I’m giving you most of an answer. It’s just not doable (unless there really is magic in ME). WDM drivers for audio, yup. Network NDIS drivers, yup. Even some of the filter/bus layer drivers and more _but_ video is near impossible.
I’ve no idea how you get a 32bit GDI driver, which incidentally aren’t entirely WDM to operate on 9X that requires a 16 bit DLL. They require different compilers, linkers and produce a different exe format.
Seriously. I’ve spent years writing windows drivers and tackled this problem some while ago. Whilst I could get WDM audio drivers to operate on 9X with cunning use of filter drivers to mimic NT’s kernel calls not present in 9X I could not get a display driver that would operate across both platforms.
Is this the Xandros that is paying Microsoft for patents and to partner with them?
So…
Plan9? A really tiny Linux? OpenBSD? NetBSD? QNX?
It’s pretty much the same as every previous review, and those reviews were done at Computex. This guy has been sent a demo to play with, he could have written a much more comprehensive review.
One of the criticism of the eee pc has been the resolution of the 7inch model (800X480). Why not visit a couple of websites and describe how the pages are displayed, how easy it is to view websites for long periods on this display.
We know that the speakers take up a large part of the screen, EVERY review has said that and its plain to see. A better thing would be to tell us what the sound quality is like, surely? This isn’t rocket science!
Boy, I’m soo annoyed by this screensize. They could easilly put in a 10.4″ screen with 1024×768 resolution… bleh. I have a old Sony Vaio with that screensize and a P-III 800 mhz, so I know it’s doable 😉
give me a bigger screen and i’ll have one, maybe two.
yea, 7″ sucks.
Any update on when this will actually be out? First they said August, now it looks like it wont be available during September either.
Still want one when they become available though!
So what would be a low cost?
I bought an old Dell Latitude x300 1.2 GHz, 640 Mb ram, 40 GB, 12″ screen for euro 340 so lower than that it must be.
Looks like no external screen/mouse/keyboard can be attached!?
I take that back..
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Hands_on_with_the_ASUS_Eee/
http://www.eeeuser.com/
First it was July, then August, still nothing to see…
It might not be the most amazing thing in terms of raw specs but at 130 odd quid this would make a lovely little sampler. Stick samples on SDcard, boot linux, some homebrew software that displays a simple sequencer and MIDI->audio mapper and, of course, a USB -> MIDI dongle and away one goes.
Probably not the greatest sound quality but when you’re just one instrument in a mix that’s OK. Plus… it’s cheap, Cheap, CHEAP! I’d have 2!
…and there’s all that lovely SSE2/3 goodness to process sound… AND… it’s silent.
Does anyone know if the EEE includes dev tools with its linux install? e.g. make, gcc et al…
This device was mentioned on the 10-minute “gadgets” segment on BBC Radio 1’s Jo Whiley morning show this week. I couldn’t believe the guest expert on the show (who usually is busy getting overexcited about the latest iPod or whatnot) showcased a Linux-based device, and actually went as far as to explain what Linux is, in a not-too-intimidating manner!
In a nutshell, his account of Linux was: like Windows but free [as in beer]; a lot of programs are Windows-only so won’t work; but there’s often a native replacement available. (Which is pretty much how I’d summarise it to anyone who asks)
In the same spot, he also mentioned the Dell Ubuntu offerings and gave them a fairly nice thumbs-up too.
The times they are a changin’…
is a bargain. It´s even cheaper then an i-pod nano. In addition since it runs linux the functionality of the device is sheer endless and not locked. Nice to have a UMPC at this low prize accessible for a lot more people.
The screen resolution is way to small for me but the VGA output should fix that. Anyone know what the external video resolution is capable of?
Given the amount of memory onboard I’d be surprised to see it do anything but mirror the display.
I was wondering about the quality of audio and video considering if this can be perfect computer for my living room. At this point i am not interested in HDTV but I am interesting in computer that can stream music or video from my server or of the internet and can be hooked up to a receiver or SDTV.
Therewere news about a 10″ version in which I am way more interested (assuming the resolution is at least WXGA). The lid of the 7″ is actually big enough to house a 10″ Panel, so it shouldn’t be a huge problem.
7″ and 800*480 is just not enough for me. My 12″ thinkpad is way to big for me and has not enough resolution.
Exactly my idea. I do own a 10″ laptop, old Sony Vaio, but it’s really getting old now. So I’d buy this thing if it had such a screen. I would also love passive cooling, get rid of that fan, plz… Long battery life rules. My current 500mhz/256mb laptop is good enough for KDE, so I have no problems with 900mhz/512mb 😉