eeepc: Fri Nov 30 02:10:00 2007

Fri Nov 30 02:10:00 2007

Picked up an EEEpc (4G, white) just before Thanksgiving, and have been beating it into the shape of what I consider a normal laptop. This involves getting lots of little things working...

• ratpoison and xdm instead of icewm
• real init instead of fastinit so I can have my username
• Debian sources.list entries so I can pull in... lots of things
• the "bulky" parts of my homedir stuffed on an 8G SD card
• my RSS feed collection (under akregator
• my web-clipping collection
• trackforward
• conkeror http://conkeror.mozdev.org/
• current IM (Zephyr) logs
• readme-blog itself
• webcomic change-monitor

There are still some not-quite-right things:

• I still fire up the asus desktop (as a window) to set up the wireless, instead of getting guess-wep working
• X doesn't always come back from suspend
• suspend on lid-close is only suspend-to-RAM which still burns battery
• still don't have modified-kde build tools
  • thus stlil don't have kphotoalbum which was sort of the point :-)
• still need to manually edit boot args if I ever reboot
  • INIT=/sbin/init is sufficient to override fastinit (the value INIT is parsed by the fake init in the initrd, it isn't the kernel-start value) but changing that menu.lst requires actually booting some other linux install and mounting the underlying filesystem.
• a few font things need to be parameterized better - usually I use one laptop at a time, and now I'm using the EEE for "personal" stuff and the T60p for "work", with some bleed over but it does avoid some synchronization problems, and helps improve some habits...

The one important end-to-end thing I haven't done yet is to spend a day taking pictures, upload them to the EEE, caption them, and post the best-of to flickr... like I already do with the T60p, but without lugging the extra hardware. That will be what makes it "real" in my mind, and not just an experiment with a cheap toy :-)