Netbooks

I began writing this in early 2009, when I heard about an attractively priced netbook (about $200) called the Asus eeePC. Now this page falls into the "historical" category, as I never did buy a netbook, and probably never will, my interest having transfered to tablets.

Netbooks and the ASUS eeePC

The concept here is a compact, battery powered, all solid state thing that can run gtopo and carry around a states worth of maps. The idea came my way in early 2009, when a coworker told me that Best Buy was selling a version of the Asus eeePC (the 900A) for about $200. A couple of weeks later this is gone from the Best Buy website, so maybe they bought the last of this particular unit and sold them at fire-sale prices. I has edgy feelings about buying anything like this from Best Buy (their horrific customer service is legendary), so maybe it is just as well.

Some of these have SSD (solid state disks), and these are what I want! Others have plain old hard drives (typically 120 or 160G).

Some ship with linux (which allows a lower price point), others ship with Windows XP (I haven't seen any with Vista, for whatever that means). All this is moot, since I would immediately install Linux, and why pay extra for Windows when I am just going to toss it.
The Asus 900A was shipping with a linux variant called "Xandros", but the advice was to immediately replace this with ubuntu-eee (now called easy peasy - yecch, what a name!).

There seem to be new models every day, coming and going, here are some:

The SDD modules are upgradeable, but I have yet to navigate these waters. I am happy to install software onto the built in module, and use a card slot for maps via flash cards. It seems like all of these have 3 USB ports and a MMC/SD card slot. 16G SD cards cost about $32 (and 32G cards cost over $100!!!)

ASUS eeePC 701 The 700 series has a 7 inch display (small is good or bad depending how you look at it). These have Celeron processors and 512M of RAM, either 4G or 8G SSD, and can run windows or linux. Battery life is 3.5 hours.

ASUS eeePC 900A This unit, the Asus eeePC 900A-WF8801, was the one Best Buy was selling for $200 and first got me interested. A 1024x600 display, 1G of RAM and a 16G SSD. This particular model originally was shipped with 5800 mAh batteries (giving a 3.5 hour battery life), but later models shipped with 4400 mAh batteries (only 2+ hours of battery life!), so maybe it is best that I didn't jump on the impulse buy.

The 901 claims 8 hours of battery life (it is Atom N270 based), the linux version comes with a 20G SSD. Newegg has only windows versions (for $440), for the money I think I would get the 1000 in a linux variant with a 40G SSD. On the other hand, the 10 inch 1000 unit is beginning to get too big.

ASUS eeePC 1000 Spending twice what originally got me interested in all this would get me the Asus eeePC 1000, which ships with linux, and a 40G SSD (solid state disk). The main complaint seems to be the noisy fan. People hate the tiny keyboard (which is no surprise, I hate every laptop keyboard, but as all I intend to do is run gtopo on it, who cares about the keyboard!) Battery life is said to be good, (Asus clains 8-9.5 hours) The hard drive is actually split 8G/32.

Acer Aspir One AO110=1626 Newegg sells this for $239 (in 2/2009) with the Intel Atom N270 processor (good for low power use), and shipping with "Linpus Linux Lite" -- whatever that is. A 1024x600 display, 1G of RAM and 16G SSD.

GPSD

See the gpsd website. What gpsd does is to set up a service on port 2947 that makes GPS data (from connected serial or USB GPS receivers) available. It comes with a set of linux hotplug scripts. I supports any NMEA-1083 compliant GPS device and a list of tested devices can be checked on the website.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Gtopo / [email protected]