Feckoff.net

I’m a longtime Firefox user, and Firefox 3 is my browser of choice on my desktop PC (Windows Vista) and on a regular laptop (Ubuntu 8.04), but it seems a bit inadequate for low-powered small-screen devices like my Asus Eee 901, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04.
Firefox seems very slow on this system. It seems to freeze and pause a lot while its doing stuff in the background which I never experience on my faster systems. Because of this, I went looking for a suitable replacement for use on the netbook. I would have liked to try Google Chrome on it, since I liked it on Windows, but it is not yet available for any other platforms. I ended up choosing Opera 9, which feels much, much faster on the little Eee. Its also readily available from the Ubuntu repositories. I wasn’t a big fan of Opera on Windows, preferring the “feel” of Firefox, but I’m sold on it for this kind of machine.

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Since I got my Asus Eee 901 last week, I’ve been fiddling around with Ubuntu 8.04.1 on it, as the preinstalled Xandros OS on it was a bit too restrictive for my liking. Installing Ubuntu was easy enough, as there are tools out there to make bootable USB flash drives that you can use to run the installer from.

When Ubuntu finished installing there was still a lot of work to do, with both the ethernet card and wireless card not working, as well as some other less important components like the integrated webcam and keyboard hotkeys. There are some pretty comprehensive instructions on how to get everything working here.

That got me a working Ubuntu desktop, which is nice but it doesn’t do anything special to cater for machines with limited screen real estate like today’s sub-notebooks/netbooks. That’s where the Ubuntu Netbook Remix comes in. Netbook Remix is a project at Canonical to build proper support for these machines in co-operation with OEMs, so that you will eventually see Ubuntu available as a preinstalled option in the future.

There are some fairly quick-and-dirty instructions on what you need to do to get netbook remix installed here. This is still in beta with no release date announced, but I would expect something to ship around October, when Ubuntu 8.10 comes out.

Despite being beta software, I’m finding it very smooth and polished. The only problems I have encountered are when I run it with Compiz visual effects enabled.

Here are some screenshots. Click them for full size in the Eee 901’s native resolution of 1024×600.

The wallpaper image you can see in the background is one of my own photos.

Update: Uh-oh, found a bug already! It doesn’t seem to return from standby very well. When I just had basic Ubuntu installed with the various steps taken to get the Eee hardware all working standby/resume worked fine.

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I just got my shiny new Asus Eee 901 delivered at lunch time today. Its the 20GB Linux model. I am most impressed with the fact that it worked with my Huawei E270 3G device out-of-the-box! That’s not a familiar experience for me with Linux and these devices.
This thing is tiny and very light. The battery is a bit heavier and bulkier than the one in the older Eee models but the extra weight brings with it much longer battery life. Apparently 6 hours should be easy to achieve on this, and 7+ if you turn lots of stuff (wifi, bluetooth, screen brightness etc) off.
Oddly, both the onboard bluetooth and webcam were disabled by default in the BIOS but both have been functioning perfectly since I enabled them.

I haven’t had much time to play with it yet as I am in work. It’ll get a decent go when I get home this evening

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