A Review of the ASUS Eee PC with Xandros Linux pre-installed.
Yesterday I finally received my ASUS Eee PC 901 pre-installed with Xandros Linux. Note that Xandros is a Debian-based distribution. I was really excited to start playing with this new toy. Almost from the beginning I was experiencing problems and after doing some Internet searching, I realized I was not the only one. All problems though were related to the operating system and not the hardware.
By default the operating system loads in a Simple or Beginner Mode. Knowing that this PC is mostly intended for basic PC users that just use the Internet and a few productivity applications, I did not mind it. There are some methods to enable Advanced Mode which is the desktop that you and I are more familiar with. I must admit though that the tabbed navigation feature for the desktop is kind of neat. It is just that the icons and font sizes are much larger than they need to be. It sort of makes you feel like you are playing with a children’s educational toy.
On the first power up (out-of-the-box) you are asked a few questions which will set up your login profile (i.e. name and password). At first glance all seemed pretty smooth. I have a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 20GB SSD, etc. The wireless signal being broadcasted was picked up and connected without any problems. I was good to go, right? Well, not really.
- When I first shut it down, it did not shut down properly. The screen went black after a few seconds but the PC was on and stayed on. I had to manually press down on the power button to force a hard shut down. I have yet to experience this behavior since the first and only time. After searching on the net I found that this was an extremely common problem.
- The webcam and bluetooth have been disabled by default and it baffles me to think that ASUS is attempting to build a user friendly environment which may require a user to travel into less than familiar territories such as the BIOS to enable it.
- Sometimes when moving the mouse cursor from the touch pad, the cursor seems to jump to random places.
- When you initiate an application from Simple Mode, there seems to be a long pause between the time you clicked to the time it takes to start loading.
- In Simple Mode the icewm uses a Windows XP theme ONLY!!! Seriously?!?!
- Even the graphical update process is horrible. It is horribly set up and horribly managed. I would normally bring up the terminal (to bring up uxterm simply press CTRL + ALT + T) and use aptitude, but one of the updates killed this hotkey function and I am unable to get it back! A PC without a command line! I cannot survive this.
- Also out-of-the-box the operating system came partitioned into two separate partitions: (1) the system (for apps and such) and (2) the home (for personal files). After I finished my initial updates the 4GB system partition read 100% used and I am unable to get more updates and install any more Eee apps. I also cannot do anything from the OS to modify the partition. There is a disk viewing utility that you can load but it only allows for you to view your partitions and not modify it! After some research I also found out that this was a known problem. The Eee PC was setup with UnionFS. Space becomes a problem when updating applications, in which older packages never get removed and space is wasted.
What kills me is that they give you a set of recovery CD and DVD but unless you have a USB external DVD-ROM drive you will obviously not be able to do much with this. It would have been more appropriate for them to install an image on a small USB Flash Drive and package that in instead of the CD/DVD.
Very shortly I will be dumping this operating system and install the Ubuntu Netbook Remix or even Easy Peasy (another Ubuntu-based distribution specifically for the ASUS Eee PC). All the frustration is just not worth it. I also believe that this Xandros Linux installation may be giving GNU/Linux a bad name to the end-user market. Whatever it is doing, it may not be doing the good we expect it to be doing in the adoption of GNU/Linux.
