New piece of hardware - Asus Eee PC laptop

Recently, I've picked up an Asus Eee PC laptop. Its a delight to use, and it suits my needs perfectly. It is also priced very cheaply.

Hardware features:

• 800 MHz Intel Celeron ULV processor
• 512MB RAM
• 3 USB 2.0 ports
• Ethernet port
• Wireless Networking
  
• 4GB flash hard disk
• SD card slot
• Webcam + microphone - works well in low light!
  
• Completely silent
• Very small and light!
  

Software features:

• Xandros linux
• OpenOffice
• PDF reader
• Media players - Video and MP3
• Internet tools: Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, and others
• Video recording tool - works remarkably well!
  
• Geometry program, similar to Geometer's Sketchpad
• TuxRacer, a 3D racing game, that runs very well!!
• Frozen bubble game
• Crack Attack game
• It boots in only a few seconds!
  

Upon seeing TuxRacer running, I was sold. I knew that I would be able to get my programs compiling and running well on this platform without too many problems.

Changes I made to enable me to build and run my 3D apps:

• Switched to Advanced Desktop mode
• Installed gcc
• Installed Mesa DRI library (direct hardware access) and MesaDemos - Mesa demos compiled and ran very well!!
• Installed QT library - the QT examples compiled and ran well too, including the OpenGL ones
• Grabbed mkmf, and excellent Perl script which generates makefiles automatically from a directory with source files in it.

I'm delighted to say that the programs compile and run well on this computer.

I wanted to install KDevelop, but I gave it a miss when I realised it means disrupting the rest of the system. Contrary to what lots of people have written in the Eee forums, I don't want to waste time installing a new distro. The distro it comes with has been tested with it, it runs well, and comes with lots of great software out of the box. I don't want to waste months tuning and adjusting some new distro - my interest is in coding, and thats where I want to spend my time.

I'm delighted that the desktop is so functional and solid - A simple touch I really appreciated is that a symlink pops up in your home directory pointing to the USB drive when you connect one.

This is straight out of the box. So many other things in this distro work smoothly and as you'd expect straight out of the box as well. Asus has done an excellent job with this, because it brings a clean, usable, efficient system that features the stability and solid engineering of linux to the mass market.

Resources:

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/
http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/pool/
http://forum.eeeuser.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC