So, I began looking for Eee PC last year (well, more than two weeks ago, anyway) and my original plan was to buy one while I'm in Berlin for new year. However, since there wasn't any Eees available in Germany until second week of 2008, I was in some disspair becuause we where leaving on 6th.
You can understand when I read Avian's blog post about his new Eee PC. He is in Slovenia, and I'm in Germany and he managed to buy it? How? Quick e-mail later, and he said that it's available in Building of Fun, some kind of on-line web shop in Ljubljana. Since Slovenia is so much closer to Croatia than Germany (in which I was at that time) I just postponed my purchase for better times. In meantime, Kost got interested also, and after return to Croatia he contacted them and we bought our units.
That would be happy part of story, if only one of them didn't have one constantly lit LCD pixel. Reviewing ASUS warranty, I found that I found one point:
2. TFT LCD defect policy -- Eee PC does not provide ZBD (Zero Bright Dot) warranty for TFT LCD screens.
Yes, it's in there, one you buy the unit, that is. Since we couldn't replace it today I guess I'm out of luck. I will try some of software solutions over the night in hope that it will go away, but some more drastic measures like rubbing LCD screen gently are just too much to ask from me...
Other than that, it's a great device: designed for wifi communication, quick browsing and occasional terminal session using ctrl+alt+t. It's not designed to be primary PC, but all features are so well integrated and working seamlessly that I will have hard time reinstalling it with Debian. Until I need dwm which I got used to so much. I can probably wait for a few more hours :-)
I can't say anything about battery life, other than fact that it got half-filled in two hours while I was working on it with wifi. I will do some monitoring to see how well is battery holding on this device (there isn't acpi command, but all /proc entries are there, so it shouldn't be problem).
Form-factor is just great. Yeah, keyboard is small, but I can type on it (with my big fingers) without any problems. We did try to boot few distribution from USB stick (including Puppy and some Slackware derivative) without any problems. Well, there shouldn't be any: this is basically a palm-top size Intel box (at last!) with strange screen size of 800*480.
After first day with my Eee PC, I'm very pleased with it. To make things a bit easier now that I'm back on ThnikPad, I wanted to access Eee PC using keyboard and mouse from ThinkPad, so on eeepc I edited /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc to remove -nolisten tcp, restarted X using ctrl+alt+backspace, typed xhost mylaptop.lan on eeepc and then started x2x -west -to eeepc.lan:0 on my laptop and now I can pass from laptop to eeepc sitting on left with just a mouse move. Sweet.
Comments (1)
Just picked up my Eee Pc in LJ with two ZG friends today at http://www.jae.si/ -just check out their page for the actual address of the store -it is in thef northern part of LJ in the industrial area -people at JAE were really cool -although it seems they are selling so many of the eeePc that maybe there might be a stock problem -i sent them an email when i was SURE ii would come on a certain day to buy 3 (with my ZG friends) -they sent me an invoice within the hour and had the 3 units set aside waiting when we arrived!
If you google eeepc restricted to .si domain you will find a link with several other SLO vendors offering the eeePc -mikronis might have it next month in ZG but you can get it now for 300 euro in SLO and pick up some extra hardware at the same time for much less than in HR!
cheers.
J.
Posted by jetfin
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January 26, 2008 4:46 AM
Posted on January 26, 2008 04:46