New Laptop

[ziggy29]

By the way, Puppy is much faster booting than Ubuntu, and Ubuntu seems to boot a little faster than Windows. I think I am going to try Puppy on a flash drive on this Asus and see how it works.

That's what I was thinking. I was looking at some 8-16 GB USB flash drives (don't have one now) and see what I think of Puppy on my new 1000HE Asus Eee since I understand it can be booted from a flash drive and the entire OS can fit in memory (and I have 2 GB memory). It came with XP and if the "Puppy experiment" works well, I'd probably flatline the whole machine and reconfigure it to boot either Puppy or XP (and perhaps Win 7 in the future -- no way to Vista).

 

[tuixiu]

2GB is a ton for Puppy, especially if you're mainly running the default lightweight apps they've bundled with it.

My coworker boots from flash too but he run Mint. That's a great distro and all but man that poor guy boots up then goes to get coffee for 10 minutes while his rig comes to life.

The version called Puppeee is supposedly built to have everything on your Asus configured to run correctly I'd be curious if that's your experience.

 

[ERD50]

That's what I was thinking. I was looking at some 8-16 GB USB flash drives (don't have one now) and see what I think of Puppy on my new 1000HE Asus Eee since I understand it can be booted from a flash drive and the entire OS can fit in memory (and I have 2 GB memory). It came with XP and if the "Puppy experiment" works well, I'd probably flatline the whole machine and reconfigure it to boot either Puppy or XP (and perhaps Win 7 in the future -- no way to Vista).

This is getting interesting. I see that amazon has the ASUS 901 for $280, free shipping.

That pupeee version sounds great, running from a flash drive sounds nice for security. I have a trip coming up, I am thinking about getting one to have a nice travel computer, and also thinking about adding a USB ext hard drive and using it as my music player at home.

Can you run Netflix streaming with this (boxee)? If so, this is incredible function for the price.

-ERD50

 

[Rustic23]

I have streamed netflix with the asus. So far however, I have not been able to get a copy of puppy to boot to the asus from a usb. Could be the usb's but I doubt it. I have not tried it with my big computer yet.

 

[ERD50]

Pulled the trigger today...

So I've been curious about these netbooks and Linux for a while now. We will be taking a short trip end of May, so I decided it would be nice to have a very portable laptop to take along.

So I ordered the Asus PC 901 from amazon, $280, free shipping.

I'm poking around the linux, pupeee, and ASUS forums. I think my plan will be to get the basics working with the supplied linux distro, but then I'd like to try out pupeee.

In addition to just having a portable machine, I hope to use this (with an external USB drive) as my main music server, using the boxee app.

If things go well, I may go with Linux for my main machines going forward, but just looking at the forums, there sure seems to be a lot of "gobbledygook" to get through with installs and mods. Maybe it is not so bad once you get your feet wet.

I was tempted to go with the Dell mini 9, as that can be 'hackintoshed' to run OSX (a fallback if I really don't like Linux). But by the time you get comparable SSD, webcam and Bluetooth on the Dell, the price was > $400. I'll take the chance that Linux will be fine for me.

I'll update as I move along.

-ERD50

 

[ziggy29]

I installed Windows 7 RC1 on my EEE 1000HE last night. It came with two partitions and the second one was unused, so now I have a dual boot with XP and Windows 7. There were a couple of hacks and drivers I had to manually reinstall, and out of the box the wifi driver in Win 7 doesn't work for this EEE model, but I was able to install one designed for XP that works.

So far I'm fairly impressed. The performance is pretty good, at least with 2 gigs of RAM. I'm using it now.

I've also installed a variant of Puppeee on a USB flash drive that I play with from time to time. I think the next version of Puppy Linux (version 5) will be more netbook-friendly so maybe I wouldn't have to use special homebrewed distros.