Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Getting down with my EeePC

I've been playing around a lot with my Asus EeePC 701 4G lately. Actually, I've possibly been playing a little too much even since I've had to restore it to factory settings three times after being a little too adventurous with it.

With great help from the excellent wiki and forums at eeeuser.com I've played with and tweaked my EeePC plenty. I've activated the full KDE desktop, modified many of the shell scripts controlling the hardware, overclocked the CPU (which also included installing new kernel modules and playing with the fan-settings), compiled new kernels, done some network-hacking with Wireshark and aircrack-ng and much more

Last night I took a shot at enabling some 3D goodness by installing Compiz on the little beast and, low and behold, it actually worked!

As you can see it does indeed work, and pretty well at that! Very impressive for the modest hardware of the EeePC.

However, with a screen resolution of 800x480 the wobbling and bouncing windows get pretty annoying, and transparency doesn't seem to work (the thick black lines around all the items on the screen are because of this). The cube desktop switching is both cool and very usable though.

I have lots of neat projects lined up for my EeePC, one being installing a touch screen (I've ordered the needed hardware already) and other being using it as a wireless access point. It's a great machine to play around with and the Xandros Linux OS running on it by default is based on Debian which means I have access to a huuuge amount of pre-packaged software - very nice!

I'd recommend this machine to anyone in need of an extremely portable and moderately priced notebook PC for basic computing (e-mail, websurfing, word processing, etc.), or to any fellow hacker or gadget-freak that just wants an awesome new toy. Although it weighs less than a kilo and has pretty modest hardware, it still packs enough of a punch to fulfill most computer users needs.

The EeePC is simply awesome!!!

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Haha! Suck eggs Steve!

This totally made my day:



From another angle: