On Friday I bought myself an Asus Eee PC 900A and thought I would share my first impressions of the machine. I had decided on this netbook in particular because of it's diminutive size and weight, being portable enough to easily drop into a bag and take with me. I also wanted a machine with a Solid State Disk, to increase the battery life and avoid having to keep the mains lead with me and ensure a power socket was nearby.
It has a nine inch screen running at 1024x800 pixels, meaning that despite it's size there is ample screen real-estate for all your windows, and the keyboard is tiny but perfectly usable for small to medium amounts of typing—though I wouldn't want to write a dissertation on it.
I played around with the supplied Xandros-based operating system, liking the speed at which it boots and the compatibility with the hardware, but the whole system felt slightly outdated. This was mostly due to the use of a low-resource menu/button toolkit, and issue with the update manager failing repeatedly.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a variant of the Ubuntu operating system. Most of the underlying software is identical, but there is a different theme and a new program launching interface that is much easier to use on the small screen than tiny menus. Installation was simple from a 1GB USB flash drive, which avoided having to find a USB CD-ROM drive.
Boot time is around 10 seconds from powered off to desktop, which is slower than the Xandros-based OS but still faster than most other operating systems. Currently just under 2.5GB of disk space has been occupied on my root drive, so you may wish to keep this in mind when partitioning the drive.
The operating system is fast to use and all of the software from the standard Ubuntu repositories will install, so you shouldn't have any compatibility issues with unusual or missing libraries. This also means you can install the full compiler suite to build applications from source if needed—something I found quite difficult with the Xandros OS.
All of the hardware apart from the webcam and microphone are working. Suspend and resume work as expected, and I had no issues with my wireless or 3G network connections. Battery life from a full charge is around three hours; plenty of time for light work while you're out or for sitting in the garden for a couple of hours, but not long enough to manage a full working day. This point is moot however, as the keyboard is a little too small to use for eight hours solid. Some of the hardware keys such as the wireless radio switch and the sleep key do not work, but the volume and brightness keys all work fine.
The solid state disk is robust and seems fairly reliable, and due to there being no moving parts it really helps with the battery life and the operatng temperature of the machine. Running it directly on your lap it can get a little warm due to the air vents in the side, but if you were to use it on a table or even on a book on your lap you should notice very little heat from the machine.
Overall I love the combination of the very portable hardware and the well-designed Ubuntu operating system, much more so than Windows or the Xandros-based OS on the same machine. So if you have an Eee PC, or indeed any netbook, give Ubuntu Netbook Remix a try and see if it works for you.
