Here is the first of many to come “Geek Stuff” posts, a new category I have started for the new year. They may not all be biker related but if you are in to computers and gadgets you should find these informative and cool.

The ASUS Eee PC

Before Christmas I picked up this cool little gadget the ASUS Eee PC 4GB Galaxy Black from NewEgg.

I was looking for something to take with me on road trips so that I could access email and check out the site. Traveling with a laptop is great, besides checking your email, you can check local weather, look for local attractions, and a number of other things.

The biggest problem I had with taking my laptop was it’s size and I really worried about the abuse it received from traveling. Did that last bump do it in?

The Eee PC fits right nicely in my saddle bag! Since it does not have any moving parts (Solid State Drive) it should be right durable and handle road trips fine.

The Eee PC is a highly portable, light-weight (right around 2 lbs.), full powered laptop PC. Folded up it measures just a little larger than a 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper folded in half. It opens to a 7″ LCD screen and a full keyboard. It has Wifi, a Webcam, integrated sound, and a microphone. It also has 3 USB ports and an SD card slot. The battery last a little over 3 hours on a full charge.

The keyboard is a little small and takes a bit of getting use to, but after a few minutes I can type on it almost as fast as I can on a full keyboard. The 7″ LCD screen is surprisingly nice. Check out more of the article for an actual screen shot. It has a 4 GB Solid State Disk and 512MB of RAM.

The default linux distro that comes installed on the Eee is OK but I wanted a bit more, so I installed Ubuntu linux. I followed the instructions I found here for creating a bootable Ubuntu Live CD on a USB thumb drive and installing Ubuntu on the internal drive of the Eee PC.

The EeeUser.com Wiki and Forums give you a lot of good information on getting all the correct drivers for the Wifi, Hot Keys, Webcam, etc working on Ubuntu. Here is a good package with all the stuff you need to get everything working. The only thing I had problems with was the over clocking, it worked but it was not very stable, I may try to mess with it more at another time.

Here is a screen shot of my Ubuntu desktop:

I grabbed the wallpaper from Gnome-Look.org (Looks Good!)

Ubuntu took up a little over 2.2 GB of the internal drive (I have also installed all the Kernel source and header packages and a bunch of development stuff) leaving me right around 1.6 GB of free space, which leaves me plenty of room to spare.

I purchased an 8 GB SDHC card to store photos, music, and documents and I will probably upgrade the RAM to 1GB just because I can (it runs fine on the stock 512MB - The thing boots to login in about 45 seconds, takes about another 20 seconds for my desktop to load after login).

Pick up your own Eee PC and a ton of other cool tech gadgets at great prices at NewEgg.

Take Care - Ride FREE

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