Since there have been a few issues with the feeds lately (see “update”:), I decided I would take advantage of the ongoing fixes to give my readership the oportunity to provide some structured feedback, and have put up a short and sweet poll for those of you who would like to have a say on things.
The poll will be up for a couple of weeks or so (depending on the amount of feedback), and I’ll post the results afterwards.
Have fun!
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An interesting package for the Asus 901 that seems to fix my gripes with the Wi-Fi toggle crashes, provides individual device management (and a GUI to define key bindings) and, to top it off, also tweaks the fan speed to be even quieter. Doesn’t do VGA out toggle, but that was something I had figured out already. The machine’s still not a Mac, but it’s bordering on usable now. |
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using two different Eee 901s. My Dad’s Windows model, where I’ve been trying to sort out a few things, and my own Linux one, where I’ve been trying to figure out just how much I can realistically get done.
I was going to go on about it at length (and drafted a three-page-long post), but this morning I decided to scrap a good portion of the original text and summarize things as follows:
The 901 was designed around the premise that a 4GB SSD for the OS and an 8 or 16GB (slightly slower) SSD for data would be enough for most purposes, a notion that I’ve so far found to be spectacularly wrong at least as far as running Windows on it is concerned.
Here’s what happened (in a nutshell) with my Dad’s Eee 901, which shipped with XP Home.
Furthermore, the thing had system restore, prefetch and a ginormous swap file active, all of which contributed to bring the machine grinding to a halt as it tried to do too many writes to the SSD. These are relatively trivial tweaks that the netbook community (if there is such a thing) has been doing for a while, and I wonder why they’re fixed in the factory defaults.
I found the 901 with XP to be rather stuttering at times, with frequent disk accesses gumming up the works throughout a session. Like most machines with SSDs, the 901 will freeze up for seconds at a time, and running Windows on it can be painful at times (I had occasional small pauses on the Acer or on the 701 under Linux, but nothing as bad as this).
I eventually set up Firefox Portable to avoid using IE6 in Portuguese (two wrongs don’t make a right), but even while running nothing but that particular version of Firefox (which is optimized for flash drives) with a single browser tab holding the Google Docs word processor to take notes, the SSD LED wouldn’t keep still.
So I suspect that the Asus XP Home install isn’t particularly optimized (or, rather, isn’t at all optimized) for the 901. Spending a few hours playing around with Windows tweaks isn’t my cup of tea, but if you get one (and I assume my readership isn’t the kind to shy away from this), I’d personally recommend trashing the Asus install and setting up Windows on it from scratch, disabling the pagefile, prefetch, indexing and other disk-intensive functions2.
And yes, I am acutely aware that this isn’t a full blown computer (in the usual sense). We just wanted the basics to work properly – and the thing runs Office pretty well, one app at a time, which is all that’s required.
But regardless of performance and hardware constraints, the amount of finagling required is a good reminder of why I switched to the Mac at home and use nothing but Citrix delivered apps at the Office.
Dealing with this kind of crap at this day and age compounds my impression that desktop computing (as in “desktop environment”) is still a mess – the leading Office suite has subtle bugs, the runners-up still haven’t caught up on the basics like features and usability, and, in general, there’s too much cruft to worry about.
Things went marginally better for me with the Linux version of the 901, but only because I removed the default Xandros install – I found it to be as hideous as I remembered it (except worse when translated to Portuguese), and installed Ubuntu (the special spin for the Eee).
I then found that the Netbook Remix UI is also pretty hideous and useless on its own, and promptly removed it.
And this is where it gets interesting to me. People keep trying to dress up Linux in much the same way as a pet chimpanzee, putting all sorts of fluff and spiffy front-ends in hope that eye candy makes it more appealing.
Well, guess what, it doesn’t. I’m not going to harp on about how the MSI guys have a much higher rate of returns on Linux netbooks, or bother to point out that every single retail store here keeps the Linux models on the back of the display whenever possible.
The point is that people want a UI they’re comfortable with, and the Netbook Remix isn’t it. For starters, it starts with the horrible Ubuntu orange look and slaps on top a translucent black glass launcher that clutters up the screen with two fundamentally different (and confusing) side bars: left for application groups and right for commonly-used folders.
That in itself might be tolerable after the initial impact, but it then tries to maximize every single window that any application puts up, which probably seemed like a good way to manage limited screen real estate but breaks a lot of the interaction model with common apps (for instance, do you really want your Firefox downloads window to cover the entire screen and hide the page you were viewing?).
Fortunately, some enterprising souls cloned the Quicksilver UI in the form of something called Gnome Do, so after removing the Netbook Remix UI and sanitizing the Ubuntu look, this was the final result:
This makes a lot more sense on a netbook, because:
So yes, I think everyone doing a tabbed UI for netbooks is wrong. Ship them with XP and stop treating people like morons, or at least give them a one-click setting to turn the “simple” UI off.
Overall, the 901’s build quality is pretty good. Asus can’t, in my opinion, design a barn door (all their machines have chromed bezels and very Asian rounded plastics that make them look cheap), but the thing feels solid. That may in part be due to the battery, but the plastics seem sturdy in and by themselves.
The keyboard does have a preposterously bad layout – I had complained before about Asus’s interpretation of where accent keys ought to be located before (with a nod to Apple’s own mistakes therein), and I have again confirmed that their placement of the right Shift key damn near makes it impossible to type at speed3.
But after months using a 701, I don’t mind it much – at least not for the relatively small amount of typing I do on it. I still prefer the Acer Aspire One’s keyboard, but I’ve found compensations.
The touchpad, in stark contrast to the Tsunami Moover T10, that MSI Wind clone I tried before is large and friendly, but for some reason Asus buried the touchpad-specific controls in the nether regions of XP Home, and I have only been able to find them once. And since this is not the first Eee 901 I have come in contact with, I have a feeling I was able to find them much easier on the US English version than on the Portuguese one. Two-finger scrolling works, but the default responsiveness is nothing to write home about – you need to tweak it to become usable.
And there is very little, if any, fan noise, quite unlike the Aspire One. In fact, a bunch of people have since pointed out this rather amusing comparison that Asus came up with (it features the 1000H, which I find too big and bulky for my tastes, but I like the fan noise bit):
The battery on the thing, by the way, seems to go on forever. Under XP, it lasted two entire evenings – roughly five hours’ usage with heavy disk access while I moved things around from one partition to another and activated NTFS compression all over the place.
Under Linux, I got around four(ish), with several working suspend/resume cycles under Ubuntu – a surprising feat considering the usual flakiness of such things in Linux machines.
And speaking of that…
It’s no secret that I personally loathe Ubuntu. The sole reason I set it up on the Eee is that I wanted an English language environment that would run a minimal set of apps and was reasonably stable.
But I keep having the same issues with it, time and again. And even on an Eee-optimized distribution, I find it completely unacceptable that VGA out doesn’t work out of the box (there is a workaround, of course, the point is that there should be no bloody need for it), that I need to know how to sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets to have minimal control over CPU scaling, to insert odd bits of XML to get it to do decent font smoothing (no, the defaults are not readable enough) and that there are two glaring issues that, in my mind, really ought to have been fixed on this particular version:
The second is easily fixable by doing:
sudo chown root:shadow /sbin/unix_chkpwd sudo chmod 2755 /sbin/unix_chkpwd
The first, alas, does not seem to have any known fix, and does not seem to take into account Bluetooth (the built-in ACPI scripts seem to deal only with Wi-Fi). And it is something I think most people will have to do quite frequently to save battery life or be allowed to use the laptop on a plane.
Having either slip past testing (even volunteer, one-man-band testing, as seems to be the case for Ubuntu Eee) is simply not good enough.
Well, even considering that the machine is a lot more responsive under Ubuntu than under Windows overall, I’m not happy with a few things:
Which is why I will, eventually, remove Ubuntu from my Eee and set up XP instead. Again.
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1 99% of the components used on current netbooks are exactly the same. Not minor variations, not competitive chipsets – the same. There is no excuse. ↩
2 Which reminds me – if anyone knows a good way to set NTFS writeback caching to around 15s or so, please drop me a line. I suspect it will make a world of difference, and I’d rather not try to use FAT32. And no, you don’t need virtual memory to run one or two apps on a netbook with 1GB of RAM. ↩
3 A miss on the right shift key will frequently result on my hitting Return, cursor up or cursor right, which means that if I glance away from the computer for a bit (something I do frequently, since I am one of those folk who will keep typing away while talking to you), I will occasionally find myself merrily stuffing words in the middle of the preceding line or breaking paragraphs in mid-sentence. Oh, and whoever removed the dedicated angle brackets key deserves a special place in Hell next to the XHTML zealots. ↩
4 I miss the near-instant startup and resume times. Yes, there are people going on about 5 second boot times, but they are meaningless if they’re not already part of the mainstream user experience. ↩
5 Since people keep asking how to go about this, I’ve gone and dug up a rather nice, even if slightly outdated video available, if you haven’t done it umpteen times like me. ↩
6 The aforesaid fix was initially spotted here, and I’ve saved a local copy of the script, which is to be bound to ACPI events by way of hotkey ATKD 00000030, 1 and 2. I’ve also started playing around with eee-control, which seems promising. ↩
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Celso’s writeup of what was (so far) the largest streaming video event in Portugal (the live transmission of a popular soccer game, for the folk in the US). Although I couldn’t care less about football, it’s nice to have competitors that raise the bar (If you can’t read Portuguese, stick a fish in your ear.) |
…I had the tremendous good fortune of marrying a beautiful, resourceful (and, one should also point out, charmingly tenacious) lady engineer that has made my life a whole lot more interesting and fun than I could ever have imagined (and then some).
I still wonder (every now and then) why she puts up with me.
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Here’s a good place to start learning about fishing knots (via Melo). Now for the rest of that change of scenery I need… |
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If it wasn’t for my dislike of hackintoshes (things are never 100% functional, etc.), I’d be returning my Eee 901 today. Despite the keyboard, apparent lack of SD card support and other relatively minor shortcomings, this thing seems to be the closest a netbook can get to MacBook hardware specs (or at least one the easiest to hack), and unless Apple comes out with something along these lines, I predict a good deal of people will grab one of these – especially around my neck of the woods. |
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The Google 2001 index is like a time capsule without all the smelly and dusty bits. Back in 1995 I was looking for 25Mbps ATM switches (we ended up doing a reseller deal with Xylan, which vanished into the mist a few years later). And yeah, Ethernet won. Thank $DIVINITY, too. |
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In the old days, you read about emerging trends in Wired way before they became mainstream – now they are truly mainstream before they appear in Wired, and the pieces merely establish the fact. Some interesting controversial comments there, too. |
I think it may be time to start considering early retirement or a change of scenery, given that today was the second time I’ve spent a night in hospital in two years.
Even considering that they cannot find anything physically wrong with me (yet), there’s surely lots to fix, and my lifestyle (or, rather, my work style) is in need of another serious overhaul1.
Me, I blame it all on stress. Or the telco industry. Or little green men from Alpha Centauri. Or, quite simply, on my trying to do too much at once and not getting enough rest.
Still, there’s nothing like coming back home and see the kid’s face light up upon seeing me. Now that’s important.
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1 Last time I lost 20Kg over a year, moved to Marketing and started cutting down on overtime. I suppose this time I’ll take up fishing or something. ↩
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Just joined it on a personal basis, although filling out the list of phones I used made for an embarassingly long clickfest (and I skipped a few, since I’ve probably used about half of what they turned out in the past nine years). Let’s see if I’ll have the opportunity to provide more feedback like this (which I happen to know a bunch of people at Nokia discussed at length). |
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A multi-process browser inspired by Chrome. Rather barebones, but a neat technology demo (and I personally love the name). |
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Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks jQuery is the best JavaScript library out there. Good show. |
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Almost catching up with Europe (I’d say they would be at Portuguese levels within two to four years, at this rate…) |
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Pretty darn good repackaging for the Eee 901, with sensible defaults to boot. Nearly everything works out of the box (except, as usual, dual head support). Power management isn’t quite up to snuff and the fan is much noisier than in XP (yeah, I’ve been wasting time again – more on that later), but it beats Xandros to a pulp. |
This weekend I established a new personal record – that of returning a machine within mere hours of purchasing it.
As it happened, the MSI Wind is now available here in Portugal as the Tsunami Moover T10, and it popped up on FNAC this weekend.
It has a pretty decent Portuguese keyboard (with disappointingly small cursor keys), comes with a 160GB HD, and there are a bazillion hackintosh enthusiasts that swear by it, so I thought “what the hell” and brought one home1 only to discover that the touchpad on it is absolutely atrocious.
For some reason, the thing is shipped with a Sentellic touchpad and Synaptics drivers pre-loaded, which doesn’t work out very well. To worsen things, the importer/integrator sticks a “made in Portugal” sticker onto it, which makes me wonder why they haven’t fixed this before the machines reached the stores.
But even if you dig around and find and install the Sentellic drivers (a feat unto itself) to tweak the touchpad settings, you’ll soon find that there is no drag scroll – the thing scrolls by tapping the corners of the touchpad, not by dragging your finger – like pretty much ever single touchpad I ever used on a laptop.
The UK forums are crawling with complaints regarding the Advent 4211 (same machine, different name), so it wasn’t hard to confirm that there were other issues with the touchpad.
Which was a shame. The machine is small and light (only a couple of centimeters larger than the Acer Aspire One) and there were a few nice touches (for instance, the restore software is shipped in an SD card instead of on a CD), but there was no way I was going to use a machine with such a poor touchpad.
Which, again, reinforces my resolve to stick to Macs as much as possible – there is absolutely no way Apple would ever turn out a machine with such a shoddy component.
I ended up exchanging it for another Eee 901. Despite my extensive criticism of its rather shameful keyboard, I have been using a 701 for months now, and with my previous gifts of a couple to family, will surely be able to find a home for it if something better comes along.
Like, say, those new Macs that are supposedly due in a few days or so.
And I will surely write up a review on it – my Dad brought me his on Thursday to have a look at (XP seems to be misbehaving), so I have two to fiddle with for a few days.
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1 No, I haven’t quite gotten over netbooks yet. These things are getting insidiously popular, and no matter how much you think you don’t really need one, the truth is that there is entirely too much going on in this space for anyone related to tech to dismiss it out of hand… ↩
Update: If you’ll check my FeedBurner wiki node, you’ll notice that I’ve been investigating why feed item GUIDs were stripped away by it. My attempts at fixing this (and the migration to Google, which re-wrote the links as well) have resulted in some people (depending on which feed reader they use) noticing duplicate or “renewed” posts. This should be the last of them, hopefully. Oh, and mind the last paragraph on this post – feedback is welcome.
A heads up for all of you subscribing to this site’s feeds – the URLs have changed from feeds.feedburner.com to feedproxy.google.com (something that was meant to happen for a good while now due to the FeedBurner acquisition by Google, but which I only had the opportunity to trigger last weekend).
Google places a redirect for those of you who already used the FeedBurner URL, but I still get a whopping amount of requests for the ancient PhpWiki RSS URL (yes, even after a couple of years), and although I still have a redirect there, it’s going to go away soon.
Getting to the point, please re-subscribe using the new feed URL ASAP. Even if you don’t think it’s necessary.
Here are the links:
Since I post relatively few links (an average of one a day or less), I am also considering doing a blog + linkblog feed without the rest of the Wiki (most likely simply adding the links namespace to the blog feed). If you’re interested, drop me a line in the comments.
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Almost a year after the Open Handset Alliance announcements. Looks good, but also looks unfinished (as in a bit more unfinished than the iPhone, for those of you who might think I’m biased). The real challenge will be, as many have pointed out, getting a very strong brand behind the device (yes, there’s T-Mobile’s, but is that enough?). |
Update: No standard headphone jack (uses a proprietary USB-like connector) and no ActiveSync (but appears to sync with Google services). Not for me, then, even if it does have MMS (and cut&paste…). Maybe one day, when I don’t need Exchange that badly.
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