First, a confession to make. I used to carry my refrigerator around with me everywhere I went, because LinuxWorksOnFridges™, and I couldn’t see the point of a laptop under the circumstances.
Boy, was I a n00b. When Asus came out with the eee, featuring Xandros Linux and a KDE desktop, I saw the light. (I had to open the fridge door first, of course. Does anybody know what happens to the light when you close the door?)
The Asus eee has a few disadvantages compared to a fridge, it’s fair to say. To start with, and I know this is a small complaint, you can’t store a family-sized KFC bucket in it. Well, that’s not quite true, because it’s real easy with an industrial-sized garbage compactor; but — and I’m not going to complain about the astonishing cooling system — I find the dumplings get gooey quite fast and the gravy congeals. I wouldn’t normally mind, but picking congealed gravy out of a USB socket wasn’t what I signed up for.
So, what did I sign up for? I’m glad you asked. I signed up for the wave of the future. The best way to spot the wave of the future is to compare it against the past.
Remember all those old Win98 systems? How we laughed. The portable Linux desktop blows them away. (Did I mention the cooling system? Make sure you clean the KFC grease out first.)
This sucker has got everything. It’s got a client/server video stack called eeks or something, which I’ll get around to using once I can figure out the WiFi interface and “poop” (I think that’s the word) digital content from an Eek Client (or is it an Eek Server?) somewhere else (not sure where, yet, but it could literally be anywhere. Or nowhere. It’s a voyage of discovery!). I could never get that to work with Win98. You fail, corporate monsters!
The sound system is literally out of this world. Well, I say literally. This PlusAudio stuff is a tad noisy even when I’m driving the tractor. Since I can’t literally plunk the headphones out of this world, I fixed them on Old Yaller, who likes to follow the tractor around. I’ve never seen him so animated, and darn it, the whooping and hollering he comes out with is pretty much what I’d expect an iTune download to sound like. 'Least, if I subscribed to all that modern be-bop music and stuff.
Without a kernel of exaggeration (and who would want an exaggerated kernel?), this little beauty has everything I need. Apart from a toothpick. Up here in the Appalachians, you lose most of your teeth early on in life, so that’s not really a big issue.
Just one little problem, though, and I think I’m going to FOSS Hell for this one. The other day, a neighbour showed me his Samsung N130 with Windows 7.
Lord forgive me, I just blurted out Oh shit, it works!
But I’ll bet he can’t get KFC grease out of his USB port, either.
Comments
you wouldn’t go so hell for using win7 on a netbook, because you would already be living in it. the performance is so horrible, the only people that tolerate it are stupid grandmas who don’t know better. who though that running a modern OS on a cpu weaker than a pentium m is a good idea.
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