I’ve been wanting a netbook for a while now.
Why?
It isn’t because I’m unhappy with my MacBook; I love the MacBook (especially now that I’ve taken it up to 4 GB). I love it so much that the MacBook has almost become my primary desktop machine (pushing the beige G3 down on the stack; I’m now mostly using that for word processing and updating the SDC pages). Because the MacBook has become more of a primary machine, disconnecting everything to take it on the road has become an increasingly unattractive proposition.
What about the Nokia N800? Nice machine, very handy, very useful for checking email and some web browsing. Also great for running Maemo Mapper. But the N800 has been discontinued; while there’s a pretty active open source community right now, I don’t know how well that’s going to hold up in the future. Doing LINUX development on it is possible, but painful. And I’m getting to the point where I have trouble seeing the screen unless I zoom to 120% or 150%; doing that often messes up rendering in the browser.
What I wanted was a mid-size machine that I could use as a dedicated LINUX box, with a reasonably sized display, to do various things on:
- sharpen my LINUX skills
- penetration testing
- Wi-fi hacking
- learning Python
- brushing up on my Perl, which has become rusty.
What I really wanted was one of the ASUS Eee PC 901 machines; the solid-state drive, form factor, and pre-installed LINUX were pretty attractive. But by the time I got ready to act, these machines had more or less vanished.
“Life is compromise”, said the Buddha. Or, if he didn’t, he should have. After the jump…
I ended up settling on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA. The form factor is a little larger than I was looking at, but word is that 10.1″ is really the sweet spot for netbooks. It doesn’t have the solid-state drive; instead, it has a 160GB internal hard drive. I’ve had some discussions with Mike about SSD vs. HD performance, especially when the disks start getting fragmented, so I’m not sure this was a bad choice. I do think I paid a premium to get Bluetooth, the extended life battery, and the color I wanted, but I’m okay with that. (Best Buy had some similar 1005HA machines; you could get any color you wanted, as long as it was blue. And their machines didn’t have Bluetooth, which is important to me; I want to do some GPS hacking, among other things.)
Without further ado…
The box.
Inside the box.
The actual eee. Yes, I got the black tactical one.
The accessories, including the battery.
I spread the accessories (minus the battery, which I had already inserted) out some. Notice the power adapter; I think that’s a very nice, high-speed low drag design. I’d like to see this in more portable machines.
I wanted to give a sense of size relative to the MacBook. What this picture does a better job of illustrating is one flaw of the eee; the high-gloss surface picks up fingerprints like Gil Grissom.
Even after buffing it with a rag.
I ended up switching to manual mode (which killed the auto-focus) and turning off the flash to get this one.
In terms of thickness; that’s hard to get a photo of, but to my eye, the 1005 appears to be roughly about as thick as the MacBook. However, the 1005 slopes slightly from back to front; the front is maybe 2/3rd as thin as the MacBook. Also, with the 10.5 hour battery, there’s a slight bump on the bottom that increases the overall thickness at the rear.
Booted and running XP. That’s going to go away soon. Stay tuned for the exciting part 2, in which we attempt to install Ubuntu.
You should have lots of fun with Ubuntu. If you have any performance issues, run Xbuntu…..
[…] e. When I first got the netbook, I stated one of the reasons I purchased it was to have a high-speed low drag machine for use in the primary. After taking Project e (now with Ubuntu 10.04!) on the road for nearly a […]