Tuesday, April 29, 2008

New toys for the human :-)

I've been quite silent for a couple of weeks - mainly because of the human's RL trip to the US. Of course, this had a side of visiting some local gadget shops... And with the euro being expensive as it is... the human has gone slightly bananas and forgot that there was common sense. One of the nicest acquisitions was the Eeepc. In folded state it is quite exact to the A5 size - so it is really no bigger than most of the books - which proved to be a huge advantage in the airplane - alongside with the almost 3.5 hours of battery life. And in addition to the formfactor, the goodness one gets for approximately 350 euros (if all the math is right) is 1G of RAM, 8G of flash, wireless/ethernet, and the camera.

Now, here's the coolest part - it comes with Xandros linux preinstalled. So, even though the default desktop seemed kind of cute, the first thing indeed that was apt-gotten, was the fluxbox, gcc, git, openssl&co, and other practically pointless things. And i did not have to wipe out the whatever-other-OS-that-was-there-before and fiddle with the basics (kernel configure/compile is exciting only the first twenty times or so)

The first usage experiment shown that the human needs to compartmentalize the motoric memory responsible for typing (as now I tend to hit "F1" instead of "Esc"), and that the fingers are a bit too fat.

As a nice bonus, the beast auto-starts Amarok when it sees the iPod Nano connected to it. As a not-so-nice bonus the Amarok's song layout does not get recognized by iPod Nano, the only way I've solved that is by using the "standard means" aka iTunes on Windows.

The CPU is not a demon (only 600Mhz), and graphics seems to be not accelerated (so no SL, even though there's no point to run it as it would have been too slow) but having a familiar architecture in a size of a pocket book is very pleasing.

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