It’s tiny, cool, and giving me an administration headache

Recently we’d picked up an ASUS eee PC as a replace­ment for my ill Com­paq R3200. Well, not really as a replace­ment. You see, any­time we start look­ing into a hard­ware pur­chase, Tess and I review our need for the purchase.

To make a long story short, I’m inher­it­ing her cool little Dell M1210, and she’s tak­ing the eee PC, after I get it configured…hence the headache.

1. Wire­less net­work­ing — it seems that the nat­ive Linux install­a­tion (Xan­dros) has chal­lenges. It man­ages wired net­work­ing fine.
2. Can’t find SMB / Win­dows work­groups — I’ve got 5 or 6 other wire­less devices eas­ily find­ing my server, but not this one…yet. I’ve not tried it wired yet…that’s next.

But those things aside, it is a very cool little unit, with many pos­sib­il­it­ies. Out of the box it’s a more-than-capable web surf­ing and basic office box, using stand­ard open source applic­a­tions. Of course, I want more

Cur­rently I’m look­ing into set­ting it up to dual boot Ubuntu and Win­dows XP. This will enable greater com­pat­ib­il­ity with my home net­work (I hope) and with other net­works. We’ll see.

As for the some­what ill Com­paq? Since it’s the back­light that’s gone, I’ve plans to con­vert it to a Win­dows Media Centre box.

Tagged as: eeePC, hardware, Lifestyle Technology, Linux, Netbook, Portable, Reviews, Windows