[GEEK]: eeePC travails #0

Loyal readers, I take this opportunity to ignore you completely, and address myself to the Long Tail of Teh Google. I will resume normal frivolities shortly, and will flag these abnormal posts as [GEEK].

I have just come into possession of an eeePC, as regular readers will know­­—after a protracted period of temptation. I’m typing this post on the eeePC now, although I’m not sure how much of a habit that will become. I’m addressing myself to the Long Tail, in the expectation that others like me will have bought an eeePC, and googled to find what the hell they do now.

The eeePC was astoundingly cheap at Duty Free in Heathrow; and there were several good reasons why it was cheap:

1. It’s an eeePC 900 Straight, a newly discontinued model.
2. It was the last one in the shop.
3. It was the demo model in the shop.
4. They had the wrong charger with it—which is why I had to wait another couple of weeks until I could juice it up again.
5. The battery life is pretty ordinary: it’s the default 2.5 hours (because this is basically a 7 inch eeePC driving a 9 inch screen).
6. It has no hard disk as I’ve known it: 4 GB solid state drive, 16 GB solid state hard disk.
7. It has Linux on it instead of Windows.

Now, you’ll recall that I was determined not to contaminate my home environs with Windows, outside of careful OSX emulation twice a year. Linux, though? I mean, have they got it working yet as a Real OS? Well, depends on how demanding you are. The paucity of software is far less of an issue now that we’ve all lurched onto the Cloud. The graphical interface is acceptable. But it is still Linux, as I found; and you are not really insulated from the dreaded config file, and the Russian Roulette of putting in random configurations, to see what happens. At which, I cannot but exclaim:

Screw you and your anorak-wearing evangelism, and get back to me when your GUI Preferences menus actually do something useful.

There, that feels better already. I mean, OK, for day to day stuff it’s close to acceptable, I do have to admit. But changing this box’s state in any way is more painful than it needs to be; and what it needs to be is not very far north of zero. I don’t have the time, the patience, the inclination, or the Biblical extent of longevity needed to go spelunking.

Right? Well, let’s see what I tried to do.