Size matters

In preparation for our imminent departure I have been adding the final touches to my holiday laptop. Whilst the pre-loaded software is comprehensive and very easy for the family to use, I was keen to have access to a less dumbed-down system that could be used for remote admin and more complicated stuff. Adding the Xandros repositories was an easy task and 'apt-get' does a great job of package management. A couple of cheap 2GB SD cards means I've got plenty of storage too.

The only significant thing that was missing from a connectivity point of view was Bluetooth. I stumbled across this last evening on t'web and managed to buy one of these today in a local shop for a bargain £9.95. It really is an 'ultra small Bluetooth USB adapter', hardly any bigger than a 20p piece, that pretty much disappears into the side of the Asus. In fact it almost looks like someone's snapped off a memory stick and left the metal plug in the socket!

Unfortunately, unlike its yet-to-arrive 4G big brother, the Eee PC 2G Surf doesn't come with the 'bluez-utils' preinstalled. Getting these up and running wasn't too much of a stretch (this detail helped a lot, and there's a GUI start/stop to be had here) and now all is good. If I manage to find anywhere that doesn't have a Wi-Fi hotspot, I can connect using the data service on my mobile phone. :-)