I wrote and posted this blog entry entirely using my new Asus EeePC 900, including rescaling the photo. The Eee is a tiny laptop around the size of a large paperback book. It has no moving parts (it has solid state memory like flash cards rather than a hard disk). So far I am extremely happy with it, but since I haven't had it long enough to know if it will break – I am on day 3 – I am so far reserving a final judgment.

The Eee advertises itself as “Easy to Work, Easy to Play, Easy to learn” (hence the name), and in fact it was very easy to start using productively. Within 10 minutes of opening the box, I had it connected to my home Wifi router and was able to read my mail on the web. It took longer to set up a real mail program (Thunderbird, which was preinstalled), but that was mostly because I had to download all my mail from my server onto the Eee because I keep mail on the server to make it available on my computers and mobile phone and the Eee. My home Windows network was able to see the Eee without any configuration beyond one check box to enable sharing, but I have not yet succeeded in seeing the Windows network from the Eee.

The 900 model, which is just barely available in the US now (I have one of the first) has an 8.9 inch diagonal screen and 1GB RAM. It comes in Linux and Windows XP versions (mine is Linux), with 20GB and 12GB “disk” space respectively. (Asus wanted to sell both versions at the same price, so the Windows version has worse storage to make up for the cost of licensing Windows.) The Eee has a full keyboard, Wifi, a 1.3 MP webcam, 3 USB 2.0 ports, a monitor port, an Ethernet port, and an SD/MMC memory card port. It boots in 15 seconds and shuts down even faster. The Eee also comes with a very cute padded case.

The Linux Eee comes with all the Internet tools you'd expect (including Skype, Firefox, Thunderbird for email, etc.), OpenOffice word processor, presentation maker, and spreadsheet, some games (3D graphics are surprisingly ok), a couple of rudimentary Paint programs, and some educational software. On the programing side, Ruby and Python are built in, and I was easily able to install IDLE (the GUI development environment for Python) and The GIMP (open source Photoshop equivalent). There is a very simple tab-based user interface (“Easy Mode”) on top of Linux which is easy to use for non-Linux people and in fact completely hides the fact that one is using a Linux machine (for better or worse). (You can get a terminal window with CTRL-Alt-T, but you have to search online to find this out.) I used the instructions on the EeeUser site, a great source for information on hacking the Eee, to enable “Advanced Mode,” which is Eee-speak for a standard (KDE) Linux GUI. The version of Linux on the Eee is a modified Xandros (a Debian descendant) version, made for the Eee.

People who want to use their Eee for programming and other typical Linuxlike tasks will find that it needs a lot of tweaking to make it into a more normal computer, but fortunately there are very good online instructions on how to do most things, and a wide variety of community contributed programs to automate many tweaks. The documentation that comes with the Eee is very minimal and only covers Easy Mode. There will be a forthcoming book on the Eee, and hopefully it will provide a printed source for most of the needed hacks.

The biggest drawback of such a small computer is getting used to the keyboard, which is obviously quite small. Indeed one of the main target markets for the Eee is small-fingered children (the Eee comes with educational software such as a periodic table program, a planetarium program, etc.). The screen, at 1024x600 pixels is (barely) big enough for web surfing and is fine for word processing and email. Some programs are a little awkward to use if they make dialog boxes that are too tall for the screen (you can use Alt-drag to move a big dialog box that does not fit, but then you have to resize it to reveal the parts that were cut off at the bottom). My personal reason for wanting a tiny computer is that I am disabled and wanted something I could use in bed, and the Eee works well for this, so I am happy to live with the size-related limitations. I also grew up on Unix so I was happy to get a Linux machine which lets me reacquaint myself with the open-source and computer programming world.