First weekend with the new EeePC – some random observations

I expect to put up a real page detailing my setup here and how I get various things to work on it, but before I go to bed, here are some first impressions:

• The keyboard is, as I said, TINY. However, it’s turning out not to be a problem for me. I end up going at a little less that full speed on it, but I can still type plenty fast enough on it to be comfortable rather than impatient with it.
• Arch Linux seems to be quite nice for a distribution that uses precompiled binaries…(Yes, I’m still a Gentoo fan…). It’s a lot like Slackware, except with a “real”, full-featured package manager. There seems to be a nice selection of user-generated repositories for various purposes along with the official one, too (including ones for Eee PC 901-specific stuff.)
• So far, the wireless (802.11a/b/g/n) on this thing seems amazing. I’m getting a much stronger signal with it than ever got with any of the three different bits of wireless network hardware I tried with Igor (built-in wireless, Prism-based 802.11b PCMCIA card, and most recently USB dongle).
• GIGANTO-FONTS! GTK+ applications – including Firefox – seem to have their own special places to define font sizes, I think – I had to modify “userChrome.css” to force the browser to use normal sized fonts rather than gigantic “RUN SPOT RUN, SEE SPOT RUN” “Easy-Reader” fonts on this screen. I still run into a lot of sites that display in annoying giganto-fonts. Liferea seems to have the same problem. KDE (4.2.2) initially had the same problem, but so far I’ve only had to tell it once to use normal-sized (for this screen) fonts and all of the KDE-related applications are behaving so far. KDE seems to run nicely on this system.
• Incidentally, the browser in question is the Firefox 3.1(/3.5) Beta 3, compiled from one of the user-provided Arch packages. So far it’s running great.
• Battery life is probably not outright AMAZING for people who have previously paid attention to maximizing battery life, but I do get 4-6 hours or so out of it, which compared to my previous lazy habit of demanding maximum performance and just carrying the power cord with me is really impressive to me.
• The built-in webcam works “out of the box” – without doing anything at all to configure it, I just installed mplayer and “mplayer tv://” immediately lets me use my computer as a $300 vanity mirror…more practical uses to follow later. I’d love to design a periscope-like gizmo to hang on the edge of the screen such that the webcam would be recording what’s happening in FRONT of me, rather than recording ME.
• Sound configuration is confusingly simple. I know that sounds strange, but the last two laptops I had displayed a bewildering array of volume and mute controls for the sound. Bit just has an “out” volume control, a mute for the built-in speakers, volume settings for the two built-in microphones, and a central “capture” volume control. I haven’t played with recording yet, so I’m not sure how the input controls relate to either the external microphone port or the built-in pair of microphones (stereo!), but playback seems to work fine. I’ve already installed Audacity, so I should be equipped to play with it when I get time. It’s slightly confusing that the master volume control is called “lineOut”, but only slightly…
• The 1024×600 resolution usually works just fine and gives me plenty of space, but a few programs still seem to assume the screen is taller. Part of this is really the Giganto-Fonts problem – most of the windows seem to fit on the screen just fine once the fonts are made to display at a normal size.
• Google Earth whines about the screen being “only” 600 pixels high, and at the moment the bottom of the window ends up where I can’t see it, but other than that it seems to run fine. Given that this is the only application I use at the moment that actually needs real 3D acceleration, this is good news to me. Once I figure out how to set a default window size for Google Earth and cure ITS GigantoFonts problem it ought to be perfectly usable.

The verdict so far: “Bit” is a ridiculously concentrated piece of portable computing power. The ability to easily carry a device like this that gives me a full-powered computer and internet connection made want to dig out my DVD’s of “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex”. I also need to install some speech synthesis so I can make it say “Yes” and “No” in the proper voice-synthesizer tone…

More to follow…but now, bedtime.