EeePC Review

[Tim Wegener]

Hi David, 

Nice review...

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:00:11 +1030
David Lloyd <lloy0076 at adam.com.au> wrote:

> Are we seeing a pattern here? It _just works_. 

When playing with a friend's eeepc I found that the last.fm player in
amarok (rebadged as Music Manager or something) didn't work. 

I tried to add the extra xandros repos as detailed on the eeeuser wiki:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/addingxandrosrepos
However, at least some of them were down when I tried it. 
When I attempted to update amarok to a newer version it completely
borked amarok and I had to uninstall it, disable the extra repos and
reinstall the original. Thankfully this at least restored the original
behaviour and I didn't get into trouble for breaking his shiny new
machine. :-)

Does anyone on the list know how to get a working last.fm player
happening on the eeepc? 

Ideally, vagalume would be nice ( http://people.igalia.com/berto/ ),
but when I tried to install this it complained about missing gstreamer
libraries and these didn't appear to be available in any of the repos I
tried. 

Installing third party apps in general seems to be the biggest
negative aspect of the eeepc.

> meeting I was wondering what the music was and I've kind of become 
> addicted to the Frozen Bubble Penguin game thing. Simple game, really 
> like it...and it just works. So does TuxRacer and it's quite usable (not 
> playable because I'm hopeless at TuxRacer but that's not the EeePC's fault).

I was impressed with the smoothness of TuxRacer. Apparently it uses an
Intel GMA 900 graphics chip, presumably with free software drivers. 

> Do I miss the Gnome desktop or a full KDE desktop? No. The programs I 
> want are _just there_, and a shell is a "ctrl+alt+t" away. Why do I need 
> KDE/Gnome bloat bars...

Not sure what you mean by "bloat bars". The taskbar has about as much
stuff as a typical KDE taskbar. According to the eeeuser site, it is
not that hard to enable the full KDE dektop. 

Tim