After some initial enthusiasm and excitement, I've had some time to bear the complaints of the family and to assess such things as reliability and interaction with the other toys.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge:
- accessing the Linstations via SMB was very flaky
- much messing with RALink driver to enable Wireless N and full speed Wifi
- upgrades to ubuntu 8.10
- various hand-crafted tweaks to RhythmBox
- various hand-crafted tweaks to the SANE configuration to cope with those pesky v4l devices
- the search for the better printer drivers - hp's drivers rock by the way
- endless problems with compiz
- upgrades to ubuntu 9.04
- some of the above all over again
- repeating the search for the better printer driver
Now, none of this was particularly difficult, even given I am not an expert. However it is very time consuming and requires a certain amount of healthy sceptiscism and a methodical approach.
However all that effort, there were still problems with the most basic things that are essential for a shared laptop:
- user switching
- speaker volume just too quiet
- Wifi still not perfect
- trackpad issues
- the usual suspend issues
- endless problems with user profiles and the desktop
- key dialogues not fitting on-screen (hooray for keyboard shortcuts eh?)
- printing issues
- I could go on...
Ultimately though, to see the wee man reduced to tears because be can't control the program he has otherwise mastered (TuxPaint) is a humbling experience.
So, despite having got the linux version - primarily for the SSD drives I thought I'd use that spare XP license to put XP on the machine.
Using the instructions from primarily http://www.liliputing.com/2008/04/install-windows-xp-on-mini-note-usb.html and some of the other references I created a USB stick from my XP CD and booted a text install from it.
I opted for a 4GB system drive and the larger 15GB for data non-essentials - but more on that later.
Initial thoughts after the install:
XP boots quick - even after the tweaking in ubuntu 9.04 it loaded noticeably slower.
Lots of drivers to download to get full operation (hooray for USB sticks).
The majority are found here http://www.liliputing.com/2008/06/asus-posts-windows-xp-drivers-for-eee.html.
Do not use the 2 Wifi drivers found there: get the real deal from the RALink site: http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Windows.html.
The initial trick there seemed to be use the RALink utility as Wireless Zero config seemed unhappy - but more on that later.
So, after the initial flush of enthusiasm, how does it work?
- Suspend works etc.
- Hotkeys work
- Wifi is perfect
- Speaker volume is much better
- The touchpad seems less "frisky"
An unexpected bonus: the previously pesky wireless printer suddenly became 100% reliable from both machines using it, and Wifi performance has been great. The only downside is having to install the Windows drivers ;-)
The RALink utility initially seemed to be the way to get Wifi and this seemed to expect admin rights; your reward for disagreeing is an annoying pop-up.
Another boon is that the previous attempts to get WPA2 authentication that were abandoned due to unreliable performance of the printer and the Eee were resolved.
And with WPA2 finally, Wireless Zero config is working fine, so bye-bye RALink config and hello family happiness.
More on the 4GB system drive.
4GB is just not enough for even a lightly loaded laptop with XP - I needed to compress the C: drive; move the family's user profiles to the D: drive (non-trivial) and install non-essentials to D:.
So, now, we're very happy.
How's performance on the notoriously slow "WinDoze"?
Performance is the best I now have like-for-like comparisons for certain tasks and even certain applications.
Some specific instances:
- Flash games in the browser seem much snappier;
- iPlayer full-screen is not so sluggish as before.
- Firefox in particular was annoyingly stop/start, which seems unforgiveable on a dual code machine.
- Google Earth is unbelievable, going from an absolute crawl to something 100s of times snappier.
And this is what we want to use this machine for...
And writing blog posts, of course ;-)
