Well, with the MacBook dead I decided to do what all the cool kids are doing and get an Asus Eee PC.
So far I’m liking it. It works alright as a little web browsing box and that’s really all I ever use a PC for in the evenings when I’m on the couch. Kind hard to beat it for $320 I think. For what it’s worth I went with the 1005HA model, 160GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 10.5″ screen and a 1.6Ghz Atom processor. Performance is fine so far but playing Flash under Linux maxes out the processor pretty bad. If more than one thing is going on the video gets choppy. No problems with that in Windows though.
RIght now I’ve got it dual booting Eeebuntu and the copy of XP Home that came loaded on it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the default XP install came with only half the 160GB drive allocated to the OS and the other half was an NTFS volume just for data. So I dropped the Linux install on the 2nd half of the disk. It all went pretty smooth. The only that really pissed me off with the Linux install is that it didn’t support my wireless network card (or the wired Ethernet port!) out of the box. Seriously. It’s a distribution made for the Asus Eee PC series and it doesn’t even support stuff like the stock network card? Argh. So, I slammed a USB wireless dongle into it and used that to grab a freaking kernel package that had back ported kernel drivers in it. It’s a known issue, has been for about 6 months, and they still don’t have the drivers in the freaking install image. That just doesn’t make sense.
