Ask YC: Any experience with Asus eee? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Any experience with Asus eee?

3 pointsedw5195 comments

I have to admit, I'm salivating over this

http://www.amazon.com/Eee-PC-Screen-900-Preloaded/dp/B00191PKJK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1211406264&sr=8-1

and was hoping to "justify" it with something more than "That's just too cool!"

Anyone have one of these? Able to setup a server? How is this version of Linux? Can this be more that just a toy?

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I have one of the 4G units, got it last December.

Overall I quite like it. It's like the budget/ghetto version of a MacBook Air :)

With the flash storage, I wouldn't recommend making it any kind of a server, or doing anything very "heavy" with it.

I mostly take mine to coffee shops when I want to hack on a few things remotely, or if I have a day-trip business trip I'll take the EEE sometimes instead of my MacBook.

The keyboard is really cramped, the screen is small, and the resolution is relatively low. That being said, straight out of the box it's a lot of fun, and has (IMO) a great amount of utility/usable for the right things.

I've got one I use for demos, since my main work laptop is cluttered with stuff which I may or may not want customers to see, and since it runs XP in "look like Windows 2000 mode" or as I like to think of it "emulate the last version of Windows that actually was useful". It isn't much for eye candy.

I've rejigged the EEEPC with some of the enlightenement eye candy like the Entrance display manager with a nice theme I've designed. It's about as close to the laptops used in the film "hackers" as you can get in real, useful software.

I really like the eeepc. It isn't good for the same stuff as my work laptop is. I couldn't really do any serious work on it, but it's great for doing browser based demos on. It's not a terribly butch machine processor/RAM wise. But it's attractive in hardware and in software if you work at it.

The Eee seems to have it's own, growing hacker ecosystem.

I tell ya, I wanna git one of them there gidgets, too!

http://asuseeehacks.blogspot.com/

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cheap-steroids/awesome-mod-550-20...

http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upg...

http://gizmodo.com/346944/ten+mod-eee-pc-stomps-competition-...

I have the older one with the smaller screen. It is OK. I swapped the stock OS for ubuntu and bumped the RAM up to 2G. It is great for checking email, skype, and web browsing. It fits into the pocket of one of my jackets. It would be a great travel device , but I use my laptop to offload photos from my digital camera and the SSD just isn't big enough. Since buying a new "regular sized" laptop at the end of February I haven't turned the EEE on once.

Sorry. Here is the link...

http://www.amazon.com/Eee-PC-Screen-900-Preloaded/dp/B00191P...

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