Re: NetBSD on the Asus EeePC: Status page

[Marc Tooley <netbsdMLpostNO%spam.quake.ca@localhost>]

> >> This does not "proove" local MPEG4 decoding ability, does it ?
> >
> > Yes, as the input stream is MPEG.
>
> OK, great :-)

I do have an Eee PC, and am a huge NetBSD fan, and therefore I can with 
confidence say the following:

It's a lot easier to type on it than people think. I'm a tall guy with 
giant hands, and I have no troubles. The only problem I do have is that 
the tilde key is up next to F1 instead of the '1' key, and the 
right-hand shift key is the same size as the PgUp key, and right next 
to it, so whereas I'm used to pressing the left-hand side of a 
full-size shift key, I tend to get screwed by a PgUp instead.

The Eee PC has enough horsepower to play full-size DivX DVD rips (~ 
1.3GB for standard-length movie) without any hitches or problems and 
enough leftover to log in remotely and do little mini-development 
stuff. It has *barely* enough to play Flash-based YouTube videos in a 
browser window on its Linux aspect, but has loads to spare with 
full-screen videos otherwise.

With enough RAM you can run all the apps you want (I regularly have 
10-15 programs running simultaneously doing various things like 
transferring files around, compiling and developing, etc.)

I have compiz working on it comfortably.

Battery life, for the size of the battery, is quite good. I can stretch 
mine, with kismet, a bluetooth key, and WiFi on, to about 3.5 hours 
with a dim screen.

The screen size is fine for horizontal space, but a little short for 
vertical space. (800 x 480). But who cares? It's $350.

It's super-light (0.9 kg,) the MMC slot in the side works great with my 
16GB SDHC class-6 card, I have a 2GB SODIMM installed (which the 
default Linux kernel only sees 1GB of,) it boots into the default Linux 
install in 22 seconds, shuts down in less than 5, and its low cost 
means accidentally destroying it costs less to replace than buying and 
accidentally destroying a "real" laptop.

There are headphone and microphone jacks, and there's a built-in 
microphone on the Surf model where the webcam+mic is on the non-surf.

I use it extensively to do GPS tracks in my car (via a bluetooth key and 
a Holux GPSlim 236,) kismet and wireless security tools work on it as 
long as you have a working Linux distro on it with updated madwifi, and 
drive performance is actually pretty good--even to the MMC slot.

The LCD screen is holding up nicely.

This *is* the cheap ultraportable I've been waiting for about a decade 
for.

So, when I can get NetBSD fully using the various bits in it and 
installed and functional on a USB drive, I'm going to be ecstatically 
happy about it. :)

>
> >> I have an (old) Dell C610 (P3 700MHz/1GHz, ATI Radeon M6,
> >> 4.0_BETA) on which I tried watching a home-made Kid video (MPEG4
> >> from DV cam) and it was damm slow.
> >
> > Well, you don't get anything for free - remember that the standard
> > EeePC is underclocked at 600MHz (not the 900MHz headline figure),
> > so you get performance in the order expected for a 600MHz machine.
>
> Of course :-)
>
> If you confirm you read MPEG stream on it, then probably that 600MHz
> and extra "multimedia" extensions (MMX, SSE2, ...). And maybe the
> intel video card also helps.
>
> I'm not sure whether I'm looking for reasons to get one or to not get
> another toy machine ;-)
>
> Regards,
>    Jo