Living with my subnotebook

Now that I've spent some quality time with my holiday laptop I thought I would report back in perhaps a less excited manner than on the day of delivery. All in all I am still very happy with my purchase and the Asus does everything that I had hoped and more. The addition of Bluetooth worked really well and I could get on t'Internet from pretty much anywhere.

Firstly, I've found there's almost no reason to enable the "advanced desktop" or add any "easy mode icons" if you're in anyway familiar with a Bash shell. Reaching the command line is trivial (CTRL+ALT+T) and you can do all you need from there.

A brief look at the security of the device held no surprises - there's basically none out of the box. However, I didn't have to do much more than configure hosts.deny and disable the vulnerable Samba service for the device to be reasonably safe, if not a little noisy on the network. Enabling iptables looked a little more complicated than I wanted to try so many miles from home.

Wireless discovery is great. I updated the MadWifi drivers, installed Wireshark, Kismet, nmap, ettercap and aircrack with no problems. Three wood stools and a little bit of delicate balancing meant I could see around 15 networks from my Tenerife apartment and, due to being so high up, more than 40 from the accommodation in Tignes.

Using the Eee PC with cameras works quite well too. The built-in SD reader works very simply with the Xandros automount tool and a 5-in-1 card reader is only a little bit trickier. There's support for importing images from Canon cameras if you enable the "KIPI Digital Camera Interface" plugin in Photo Manager. However, as I'd already installed the GIMP, I got UFRaw up and running so I could play with all the formats my DSLR can produce.

Working with iPods is a bit more problematic. I was delighted that my Nano G3 was immediately recognised and mounted and I liked the Music Manager application (a rebranded Amarok). But I was less pleased when I ejected the device only to find that the music was no longer playable and that I had 8GB of "other" files. After a few days of tinkering I used gtkpod to rebuild what I found to be a corrupted iTunesDB file. All was then good but for the cover art. This is the only real disappointment I suffered and is definitely something Asus should fix.

Remote access back to the ranch worked well with a native Linux PuTTYgen to reformat SSH keys and a replacement v1.5.0 rdesktop to control some Windows machines via an SSH tunnel. I was surprised to see the ftp client was missing from the default OS installation but again this was easily fixed, as was installing Filezilla.

Save for not quite enough capacity in the battery, I get ~1½ hours from a full charge, the overall package is great. The screen is almost big enough for most tasks and I'm sure the next generation will offer a better resolution. I can't wait.