Saga of an Asus Eee User - Day 1

By Joe | March 1, 2008 | Trackback

I just received my new Asus Eee 8G yesterday. Even though I purchased the 8G model, I wanted to get an additional Transcend 8GB SDHC Card. Over the next several months I intend to keep a journal of my experiences with the marvelous little device.For the past 7 years I have been a road warrior. The computers work provides for us are fairly high end dell notebooks, but because of video processing the we do, they are fairly large. Actually, there size is such that unless you are in 1st class or in a bulkhead seat, there isn’t enough room. I tried a tablet, but didn’t really like carry 2 full size computers. There are a number of other devices available in the UMPC class, but they are all very pricey and for the most part, they are all Windows based. Since i am purchasing the device on my own, I wanted a linux OS device. So in the spirit of getting the most out of what I purchased, I will keep the entire dialog from the Eee.

When UPS arrived yesterday, it took me all of about 5 minutes to get the Eee out of the packing material and set up. This was the first time I have ever been exposed to Xandros, and I must say that I don’t like it, but I wanted to use it for several days before replacing it with eeeDora. In addition, my wife is about the most computer illiterate person around and I wanted to get her hooked on this little thing, as I am intending to purchase the pink 4G model for her. The very first thing I had to do was to get connected to our wireless network. I went ahead and clicked the little Wireless Networks icon and selected my network. After entering the keycode, I was able to start surfing. One thing I think that is very confusing about using the Wireless Networks icon is that you have to reconnect and enter your keycode every time you start up. You can get around that by using the Network icon. This allows you to save the keycode and set it to start on boot.

The Easy mode just doesn’t do it for me though. I decided to visit my friend Google to search for how to set up `Advanced` mode. I used Eric Martin’s post and it did tell me how to do it, but it was lacking in detail. If this was my wife trying to do this, it would never happen. You use ctrl+alt+t (While holding down the ctrl and alt keys, press the t key) this will bring up the terminal. I also had to pre-pend sudo to apt-get, this runs the command as root or administrator.

ctrl+alt+t
# sudo apt-get install kicker ksmserver

Now I was able to get into Advance mode, which I was much more comportable with. From here I got email set up and went ahead and disabled Samba due to the security threat. I also copied over most of my eBooks and few .avi files. Then my wife came home and basically decided that she loved this thing and that was the last I got to play with it.

I played some of my .avi videos and was very surprised with the sound and video quality. The eBooks were a bit difficult to read because of all the scrolling that was involved.

Tomorrow I will let my mom try it out. I would like to get her one for her birthday this year, if she can use it and likes it.

Topic(s): Asus Eee