New Eee PC

Got an Eee PC 900 (linux) the other day and I've been tinkering with it since then. Mine's the 900 (nine inches wide, 900MHz processor, 2GiB RAM, 16GiB SDD, cute as nails).

I have to come right out and say it, the operating system that comes with the linux Eee PCs is absolutely terrible. Xandros, as it is known, is such a failure in every possible sense of the word. It's clearly intended for either small children or extremely casual PC users (web and email, mayyyyyyybe a document written every once in a rare while). Changing anything about the operating system or it's programs is difficult to say the least. Programs are categorized according to "work", "play", "internet", etc., but the taxonomy is hardly specific enough to be useful, nor generic enough not to get in your way. One example of many questionable choices, the filesystem browser is filed under "work", for some reason (presumably because Xandros's committee of architects have never had to move files around for non-business purposes). 

Don't get me wrong. Xandros's simplicity could be its strength. It is based off Ubuntu but uses its own apt repository, which for such a special-purpose computer as an Eee is a great idea. Seriously. Maybe the trouble is that Asus hasn't really put a lot of thought into what should go into that repository. While I recognize that the desktop UI, which looks straight up lifted from something Apple tried back in the bad old times of the mid-nineties, is good for newbies, it leaves a lot to be desired from the power user. The main advantages to Xandros are that it comes with working Flash, sound, and Wifi drivers.

Which brings me to the resolution of my adventure: Xubuntu Eee. Super ridiculously easy. You boot from a liveCD on another computer, use a program included on the liveCD to load the operating system and installers onto a USB drive, then boot the Eee from the USB drive. Amazing. Details courtesy of Ars Technica.

Later, space cadets.

Upgrading the Server

Went on the dorkiest date EVER with Leila on Friday night. We went to Fry's and bought hard drives. Apparently she'd been shafted at the Tiger Direct outlet the other day when they didn't even provide cables to connect the drive (!!!). So lame. Anyways Leila bought a PCI SATA interface just in case her motherboard didn't have one (turns out it did, so now we've got a spare) and some cables—which were UV sensitive, rice rocket style. Truly a classy move. Of course I shouldn't talk: the big fat linux server at Fave, Darling, totally has neon and a window (even though it's not being used for anything right now; ugh too many servers!).

So Biscuit's got a new half-terabyte drive in her and that'll be the new /home partition just as soon as I can copy over the HUGE amounts of data that resided in /home before. I'll have room for a separate /tmp partition now, which should be handy. The old drive will be used solely for system files and will, aside from the /tmp partition, be pretty closed off to normal users. So, for my users, this will result in a better, more secure Biscuit. Soon as I can afford it there'll be a RAID. I've got room for two more drives in there, so getting two more 500GiB or 750GiB drives is not totally out of the question. We'll see.

On a somewhat unrelated note, has anyone else seen these commercials where a burly lumberjack looking dude interrupts couples in their most romantic moments to tell them to put their gear to good use in Ontario, Canada? It just seems so rude! Also, why does the guy not say "Put your gear to good use in Ontario, eh?" He just doesn't seem Canadian enough....

Also, who has any good ideas about how to make Biscuit an easier tool to use for Windows users? I'm all out of ideas now that I know it'll be decades before anyone ports FUSE to Windows. SFTP seems too hard for people since it's a pretty ghetto enterprise in Windows.