I was recently given the chance by a friend of mine to help her setup her new Asus Eee UMPC. My first impression of this thing when I first started with it was, "Holy cow how am I ever going to be able to fit my big hands on that tiny keyboard". From then on, it was really smooth sailing. The OS they pre-load on it is a custom Asus rendition of Xandros Linux running IceWM as the window manager, and I have to say, they really put some thought and effort into this thing. I was immediately impressed with the layout of the GUI. There are tabs at the top of the screen to switch between your different sections, for example Internet applications, Games, Education and Settings. Then inside of those tabs are icons that are literally your computer background...that's right, there is no computer background, your background is an interactive icon style navigation tool. I just thought that this was the neatest thing ever! Exploring a little more, it's pretty easy to setup things like wireless network and user preferences. However, in exploring I came to find out that they had hidden the terminal somewhere, and I needed it to configure the wireless to use WPA Enterprise. Come to find out, after finding the terminal, that many other Eee users were having the same wireless issues and that the Eee was actually incapable of doing it regardless of what you try to do to it. So, needless to say I was very disappointed. So I gave my friend two options. It explains in the manual how you can use an external CDROM drive to install windows XP (Very smart move Asus) and I said I could either install Windows XP, but she would need to buy a USB cd drive and they run about $50 or I told her I could try this thing I found that by putting Ubuntu on a Pendrive and then booting from that, I could install Ubuntu Linux on her Eee and it would then be capable of getting on the wireless....

So, today I have been playing around with it and got Ubuntu do what is called a "Persistant Install" to my jump drive. Basically all this is doing is installing on a jump drive so it operates exactly like the CD version, except that when you shutdown the computer it remembers what you did since you can write to jump drives, unlike CDs, and it retains the ability to let you install to the hard drive, just like the CD does. Next thing I did was boot from the jump drive. After spending about a minute in the BIOS telling it to boot from the jump drive, I discovered you can just hit esc (which at the bios boot screen Asus fails to tell you I might add) will take you to the boot device selector. So I chose the USB drive, booted it up (slowly) and in about 20 minutes I had Ubuntu running on the Eee...initially, I was VERY impressed. Since the Eee uses the Intel graphics accelerator for graphics rendering, Ubuntu has the open source driver right there so that worked flawlessly and gave us the native res...about 20 seconds later I realized that the Compiz effects were enabled BY DEFAULT on the live cd...I have never seen this before in my life, I was, for lack of better words absolutely shocked, then came the beginning of the biggest nightmare of my Linux using career. I realized that the wireless card did not work...ok, no big deal, probably just need to enable the....wait, the restricted driver for the card is already enabled...what the heck is going on! I then proceeded to do what any good Linux user does; I hit up Google to tell me the solution to my problems. As it turns out this is quite well documented, but unfortunately all the documentation requires you to have a working WIRED internet connection so that you can grab the madwifi drivers that it needs to work. Problem is, for some reason the Eee would not let me connect to my network. I tried doing everything that made my personal laptop work and nothing did. So ignoring these warning signs I decided to just try and install to see if that got the wired connection working (thinking that maybe somewhere between the CD and the jump drive something got messed up a little bit). This is where I run into more troubles. As it turns out, the resolution of 800x480 is not a common resolution and thus one that Ubuntu does not know how to render installation windows for properly...or really any windows for properly. So, the installation was done basically blindly, I could see the top where I wanted to select things, but about four fifths of the windows were cut off by the bottom of the screen...auto hiding the top and bottom bars helped a little bit, but I still couldn't see the cancel and next and previous buttons at the bottom, so I just hit enter after everything I did, which wasn't a hugely big deal, but a lot of other programs opened up this same way and for the person I was installing this for, having this problem was unacceptable. Ten minutes of Google searching later revealed a fix for this. Since Compiz is running by default on this laptop, there is a Compiz setting you can change using gconf-editor where you press alt and then click the border of the window and you can resize any window you want, not just the few you normally can. So here the Eee is, running Ubuntu, no network ability, no cd-rom drive...a virtual data island with no way to fix the problems at hand...well, at least it installed.

 In summary, the Eee overall is a very impressive machine right out of the box, it sports a 3 hour battery life, built in wireless card, 4GB of internal solid state memory, 512mb of RAM and a Pentium M processor. The default OS is great, as long as you don't need any funky wireless networking settings and are somewhat comfortable using Google to solve problems. If, however, you are a complete cluts when it comes to the computer and/or you need special WPA encryption capabilities, at least for right now, I suggest you look elsewhere. This computer is great, but like most things that run Linux you either need to know a good deal about what your doing to get special things done or you just have to live with what limited things it can do out of the box...Asus has a good thing here, I would hate to see bad reviews ruin such a marvel, but in all honesty, this thing is, as of right now just a mere gadget. Sure some may find that having a UMPC to simply do word processing and then save to a jump drive, just fine, or that they don't need special wireless capabilities, but aside from that you can see in the games that they put on it (many geared towards young children) that this is mainly intended for a younger crowd or people like myself, who enjoy tinkering with things and like the ability to change whatever they want, no matter how hard it is to do.

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