Xavi Esteve » asus eee pc http://xaviesteve.com I'm a front end web developer and graphic designer from Barcelona based in London. I am passionate in JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, PHP, Wordpress, usability and SEO. Thu, 10 May 2012 11:45:38 +0000 en hourly 1 Asus Eee PC Personal Tricks http://xaviesteve.com/5/asus-eee-pc-personal-tricks/ http://xaviesteve.com/5/asus-eee-pc-personal-tricks/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:26:34 +0000 Xavi http://xaviesteve.com/?p=5 The Asus Eee PC is one of the coolest tools/computers you can find at the moment. It came to Spain a few weeks ago and it is 300 euro worth.
A colleague brought me the Eee from the US so I have been tweaking it for a while.

The main tweaking areas of the Asus Eee PC are:

  • Operative System: Tested most of the Eee OS.
  • Firefox: Specific tweaking for Mozilla Firefox in an Asus Eee PC.

Operative System:

I rate an operative system through these 5 items:

  1. Boot speed: This is the most important. Since the Eee is a travel-handy gadget, it needs to boot fast to be useful (about 1 minute or less).
  2. Performance: Just don’t waste me time. I love those colorful effects but please load Firefox fast and don’t lag with 10 tabs.
  3. Ease of use: With 2 clicks I should access or find anything.
  4. Tools for everything: When I open my Eee, I may be a few miles from home. I may not have Internet access so it should be necessary to have everything needed.
  5. Troubleshooting: If I ever have an issue with it, will I be able to find a solution through Google or friends?
Tip for Linux: set GRUB waiting time to 0. You will save 5 to 10 seconds.
Tip for Windows: use Portable Applications instead of normal ones. You will save a lot of space.
Tip: Use Google Docs as a replacement for Office, you can install Google Gears (Win and Linux) to be able to work offline.

Xandros

I first tried Xandros but it wasn’t powerful enough:

  1. Speed: Excellent (less than 1:00)
  2. Performance: Really good
  3. Easy: Really good
  4. Tools: Very poor
  5. Troubleshooting: Acceptable

EeeXubuntu

So then I gave EeeXubuntu a try and it was really convincing:

  1. Speed: Really good (1:10 boot time)
  2. Performance: Good
  3. Easy: Really good
  4. Tools: Really good
  5. Troubleshooting: Good

Had to re-install (sometimes its quicker for me to backup and re-install whole OS than tweaking and troubleshooting misterious Linux issues).

UbuntuEee

I installed UbuntuEee. Gnome instead of Xfce (which made it loose performance but gain troubleshooting):

  1. Speed: Acceptable (1:30 boot time)
  2. Performance: Good
  3. Easy: Excellent
  4. Tools: Excellent
  5. Troubleshooting: Good

MS Windows XP

Finally decided to test Windows. Installed a lighter version through nLite.

  1. Speed: Acceptable (1:30 boot time after installing basic apps: drivers, Firefox, antivirus)
  2. Performance: Sufficient
  3. Easy: Excellent
  4. Tools: Excellent
  5. Troubleshooting: Excellent

Mac Leopard OSX

Not recommended at all.

  1. Speed: Slow
  2. Performance: Really poor
  3. Easy: Very good
  4. Tools: Very poor
  5. Troubleshooting: Very poor (no sound, no Fn keys, etc…)

Firefox

Recommended extensions

All-In-One Sidebar

[to be continued...] ;)

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