[clug] Anyone used or seen the Asus Eeepc yet? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Arjen Lentz]

Hi Antti, all,

On 27/06/2008, at 1:22 PM, Roppola, Antti - BRS wrote:
> I know of a number of people who have bought them and love them.
> Lots of them have installed Ubuntu. Good value for the money.

Got one for Phoebe and I concur. Although I kept the original OS  
(Xandros with ASUS foo).

> My other half overheard the sales dude at JB suggesting one as a
> solution for a grey nomad couple, including installing Ubuntu  
> instead. :o)


Got for suggesting this machine.

Not-so-good for suggestion to reintall the thing with Ubuntu. For that  
couple, what's the point? Replacing the OS is geek indulgence.
The default setup is quite functional, can be tweaked without  
replacement (stuff added and menus enabled), and provides a good  
system without the usual clutter that confuses regular users.
I don't anticipate any "regular users" on this list, but let's try to  
see this from their perspective before making such funky suggestions.

The default OS is Xandros (Debian based) with some tweaks. People may  
dislike it for all kinds of geek reasons, but I'd suggest that all  
those reasons are completely irrelevant for the average user. In  
addition, the risk of installing something else and having the users  
trip and move away from this machine or the Linux-based OS (i.e. going  
for Windows) is rather high. Past evangelisation and zealous  
deployment exercises have proved this in abundance. Let's not keep  
making that mistake.

Mind you, of all the distros, Ubuntu is probably the most sensible one  
for average users. However, ASUS has done a nice job with their tweaks  
on Xandros, using IceWM and various settings to declutter and provide  
a pretty neat functional system. The wifi setup is even easy, the  
printer setup works, and so on. It's good! So for this particular  
machine, let's not try to convert the world. It's already Linux!


Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Founder @ Open Query
http://openquery.com.au/   (ph. +61-7-3103 0809)
Training for MySQL in  
Brisbane,Sydney,Canberra,Melbourne,Adelaide,Auckland