It's not often that there are two big netbook announcements in one day. After all, the whole netbook/mini-notebook phenomenon is a pretty new trend and, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs says, the market is still nascent.

However, Asus today announced its new $1300AUD Eee PC 1004DN. What makes this Eee PC different from the others? Well, it's the first to market with an optical drive which, in my mind, further blurs the line between netbooks and sub-notebooks. The first netbook, in my view, was the Toshiba Libretto that was around in the late 1990s. The rest of the Eee PC 1004DN spec sheet reads similarly to most other 10" units although allow casing over the LCD and Express Card slot give it a slick look and plenty of flexibility.

The other big news came in parts. Firstly, I received a press release from Microsoft announcing that they'd been selected for the roll-out of "mini-laptops" into schools in New South Wales. This is part of initiative to get a computer into the hands of another 200,000 teachers and students. The release pre-empted one that came later from Lenovo. Lenovo completed the story, telling the world that they'll be supplying 220,000 IdeaPad S10e as part of Digital Education Revolution program.

So, not a bad day for the netbook market. A new model that's probably more a notebook than a netbook and Lenovo scores a huge sale (with Microsoft coming along for the ride).

For the February issue of PC Update, I wrote a story on Windows 7 where I tested it with four different systems.

The final word - Windows 7 shows a lot of promise and looks to address many of the problems faced by adopters of Vista. If the focus from this point is on stability and performance rather than adding new features, we could see Windows 7 help restore Microsoft's ailing reputation.

The full story can be read here.

For a bunch of reasons the Eee PC ships with either Windows XP (I'm sure Microsoft's still annoyed at that) or a customised version of Debian Linux. Both work reasonably well although my experience is that Linux doesn't seem to suffer from the same performance degradation as XP over time. Personally, I've ditched both default operating system options, preferring to run Ubuntu for the Eee.

As part of a story I've penned for PC Update, I've been playing with the beta release of Windows 7 (Build 7000). I expected to run into some hurdles with my Asus Eee PC 900 as the installation requires about 9GB of contiguous disk space. My Eee PC 900 has a total of 12GB but it's split between 4GB and 8GB disks. Interestingly, the installation actually failed but then restarted and succeeded. I'd seen this with previous versions of Windows but it seems that the installer is smart enough to start over but skip the problematic files.

I expected to encounter all sorts of issues with with the PC. However, Windows 7 lacked the correct video drivers meaning that I was initially stuck with standard VGA. This was something of a surprise as the video chipset is an older one but perhaps Microsoft is sending a message about support for older computers. Resolving the video driver issue was easy enough as the Windows XP driver seems to work perfectly.

The wireless networking worked without any messing about. In fact, the only hardware that didn't work with the Eee PC was the integrated webcam. However, to be fair, the main problem was that Asus made the appropriate Windows XP driver hard to find.

To get Windows 7 running nicely I needed to make a few tweaks. Windows 7, by default, offers to manage the best balance between performance and appearance options. However, I found the Eee PC a little sluggish but by turning off many of Windows 7's interface animations there was a significant boost in performance.

The Eee PC took about 2.5 minutes to start up and be usable. Launching Internet Explorer took about five seconds although, once it it was loaded it performed quite well. The Eee PC 900 running Windows 7 was by no means unusable and on a par with Windows XP, the OS that shipped with this particular Eee PC.

Windows 7, at least in the current beta release, shows great promise. It seems slim enough to install and performance is certainly OK. If Microsoft can resist the urge to add more features and concentrate on stability then Windows 7 might end up being an excellent option as a mobile operating system.

In researching what will be one of many stories on Windows 7 I'm sure I'll write over the next few months, I've been installing the beta version of Windows 7 (Build 7000) on just about any PC I can get my hands on. One of my test systems is an Eee PC 900.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page here, the pertinent specifications of the Eee PC 900 are:

Display: 8.9" Display running at 1024 x 600
CPU: Intel® Celeron M353 clocked at 900MHz
Networking: WLAN Built-in 802.11b/g and RJ45 10/100 Mbps
RAM: 1GB of DDR II
Storage: 4GB and 8GB disks and SD/MMC slot
Webcam: 1.3MP

As you can tell, this is not going to be a Windows powerhouse. In fact, the Windows Experience Index (a measure of how well a system will run Windows 7) gives a score of just 1.0 - the lowest score. It's worth noting that this score is a reflection of the system's "weakest" component. in the Eee PC 900's case the integrated graphics card pulled the score down.

The Eee PC actually fails to meet one of Windows 7's minimum requirements - available disk space. To install Windows 7 you'll need 9GB of free, contiguous disk space. The Eee PC 900 has a total of 12GB but that's spilt into two separate disks of 4GB and 8BG. However, I was still able to complete the installation with about 1GB of space left on the larger disk. The installation did fail on the first attempt but when I started it over it was able to complete. I had the same experience on another system so it seems that the installer is smart enough to skip over problematic stages.

Once Windows 7 was installed (about an hour using an external DVD drive), it booted up perfectly. It's worth noting that Microsoft has really managed to get the installation process right. Other than some localisation information, I was able to walk away from the installation and come back once it had completed. There weren't any "Click to Restart" dialogs or other such nonsense.

I wasn't all that surprised to find that the Eee PC 900's display was limited to plain VGA after the installation. Clearly, Microsoft hasn't included every possible hardware driver. However, on the Eee and other systems, i;ve found that Windows Vista and XP drivers work just fine. The only potential "gotcha" is that the driver installers provided by manufacturers may not work. in that case, run them in compatibility mode for XP or Vista and they should be fine. I ran the Eee's driver installer in XP compatibility mode and it worked well. You won't get the full Aero experience but I'm not sure that it's worth the overhead in any case.

Using Windows 7 on the Eee PC was surprisingly good. I had low expectations but found that even with some antivirus software installed the system was reasonably responsive. However, I'd strongly suggest that anyone using Windows 7 on such an underpowered system go into the Performance Setting and manage those settings yourself rather than letting Windows work it out for you. I disabled almost every visual enhancement other than "Use visual styles on windows and buttons". This made a significant improvement to the Eee PC's overall zippiness.

Wireless networking worked without any problems although my impression is that wireless range is a little weaker under Windows 7 than XP or Ubuntu. As radio strength can be controlled by software it may be that a driver update will fix this. However, the difference wasn't huge and certainly didn't impact my testing. It was just that places that had a solid five bars of signal now drifted between four and five bars.

I've not been able to get the webcam working yet. It needs a driver but I can't find my Eee PC CD at the moment and I could find the driver on the Asus website. I suspect that once I find a driver it'll be fine. Perhaps someone's sorted that out. If you have, leave me a comment or use Twitter to let me know.

Finally, I've noticed that the power management side of things still needs some work and that the suspend/resume functionality is a little broken. It's not a showstopper for me as the Eee PC isn't a main system for me (my MacBook Air is my principal mobile computer).

What I'd like to see in a future release of Windows 7 is a "netbook" installation. I know that would add a step to the installation process but being able to leave off stuff like the games and some of the accessories would slim the installation back leaving more hard disk free. Also, I suspect that I'll be able to eek out further performance gains by playing with the service that launch automatically. I'm not too fussed about the driver issues - this is Beta 1 so it's not surprising that it's not 100% complete.

If your Eee PC 900 (or better - I don't recommend Windows 7 for an Eee PC 700) isn't a critical working machine for you and you can spare the bandwidth, installing Windows 7 certainly won't hurt your system.

Over the last couple of months my computing needs have changed further. I've spent many hours with the Eee PC, both the 700 and 900 series models, and reckon that the new form factor they've pioneered, the netbook, has a definite place in the IT market. For me, the two major shortcomings of the Eee PC, screen and keyboard size, were too much for me to overcome.

Hence, I've sold my MacBook Pro and shifted to a MacBook Air. There are plenty of nay-sayers when it comes to Air's combination of hardware and features. Common rants are the lack of ethernet, just one USB port, the hardwired battery and lack of an optical drive. However, I'm not seeing the Air as my main computer - it's an accessory to my main system, the 20" iMac at home.

A few weeks ago, I thought that the Eee PC 900 might do the job but I kept hitting the same brick wall - the keyboard. Trying to type 1000 words on the small keyboard was just too hard for me. Perhaps others are more patient and can train themselves to be more accurate (my mate Gus is one such person).

So, I've gone for the MacBook Air. I know that my familiarity and preference for the Mac OS is part of the decision but the compromises that the Air makes are ones that I can live with. The ones made by the Eee PC were not compromises I could work around in the long term. Also, the Macbook Air is only slightly heavier that the

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the Air in due course as this is a journey that's only just started.

Today is my first day of working exclusively from the Eee PC. It has been a long time since I've spent a work day without using my regular laptop but I figured that the only way to be able to make a decision about the Eee PC's appropriateness as a supplementary system. Certainly, the Eee PC isn't suitable as a primary computer but as a supplement to a decent desktop/home-base system it's worth looking at.

My Kit for the Day

In order to get through the day there were a number of accessories I needed to pull together so that my Eee PC 701 was usable as a serious business tool for a day. Here's the list

• Asus Eee PC 701 (obviously) with its power pack
• Proporta Gadget Bag
• Huawei E220 modem on the Three data network
• A clutch of USB memory sticks (I usually have three or four on hand)
• My Moleskine notebook and Fisher Space Pen (just in case)
• A Google account

The Day

My work day started with my daily commute to Melbourne's CBD on the train. The carriage was particularly packed today and, although I got a I was stuck between two largish gents. I managed to extract the Eee PC, connect the modem and fire up an Internet connection. I altered my Gmail account so that it's collecting all my POP3 email sources. That means that I can use Firefox(here's how I upgraded).

At work, I used a USB stick to copy a bunch of files I needed for the day's work to the Eee PC. This is probably a one-off activity as there's enough storage on the Eee PC to hold the documents I need.

The main operational issue I'm facing is the screen resolution. I'm finding that the 800 pixel width means there's lots of side scrolling in Firefox and when reading documents. I suspect that even with a 7” screen that a higher resolution would make the Eee PC 701 fr more usable.

The other, less critical, issue is font quality. I've not found a font smoothing option for the Eee PC running Xandros. This is especially problematic when using reading slabs of text. Does anyone know of a solution?

Battery life in a day of real use was reasonable but still a little thin. Three hours was good with the 3G modem constantly active but with WiFi turned off. In an ideal world I'd like to get closer to six hours off a single charge. Hopefully, a decent third party or extended battery option will come to light soon.

Can I Sell the Laptop?

I'm wondering whether I really need my MacBook Pro. Certainly, it's a far more capable computer with a great display, full-sixed keyboard and a plethora of applications. However, the Eee PC is far more portable and doesn't stop me from doing most of my day to day tasks.

I still need a decent PIM application s I don't like the supplied Organizer application and I'd prefer to not use a solution that requires a web connection like Google Calendar. I still need to do some investigation for a better solution.

The same goes for email – Gmail is OK but I prefer an offline application. Thunderbird is competent and I will need to give it a decent run. My problem is that I have a lot of folders and intelligence built into my installation of Apple's Mail.app. I'm going to need to find a way to deal with that.

The display is small but as an email reader and tool for occasional document creation it's OK. The keyboard takes some getting used to. Initially, I kept hitting the “s” instead of the “a” and find that my hands get a little sore if I type for more than about 30 minutes at a time. However, that's not something that happens often.

I'm not quite ready to give up my laptop yet. I really like the idea of the Eee PC but, and this about my capacity to change my work habits, there are many compromises. I wonder how many of these are about the form factor and how many are due to how the Eee PC's OS, Xandros, does things. I'm going to try to work mainly from the Eee PC again tomorrow and use the desktop for my main work.

Firstly, welcome to any visitors who have found your way here from Lifehacker or any of the other sites that linked to my recent post on Getting Started with the Eee PC.

One of the other sites i contribute to is a venture called Hydrapinion where me and four other journalists take a turn at writing about a favourite subject each week. My beat is called "Carry" where I cover mobility related topics.

My post at Hydrapinon this week covers my continuing journey of discovery with the Eee PC and Linux. It follows on from a piece I wrote the week before where I suggested that Linux has some substantial issues that need to be addressed before it's really "consumer ready'.

Now that I'm getting the hang of installing apps on the Eee PC (I still maintain that it's too hard but that's an old rant) I'm looking at a few apps to make the Eee PC even better.

The installed browser, Firefox 2, is competent enough but it's a little long in the tooth. After a little research I've settled on two candidates - Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. Here are my impressions.

Opera 9.5

Installation was dead easy with Opera coming in a deb package that installs simply. The main trick was to download the correct version - the one for Xandros 1.0 and 1.1. The version for Versions 2 or above didn't work for me.

Once it was installed, I imported my Firefox bookmarks and was up and running in a few short minutes.

Browsing was definitely faster than with Firefox 2. The user interface is very clean with the default theme making a nice change from the regular grey/blue toolbar arrangement.

Tabbed browsing works nicely although I was annoyed that my favoured Ctrl-Click on links for new tabs opened the new tabs in front of the current tab with no option (that I could find) to open new tabs behind the current one unless I used the right click and selected the appropriate option from the context menu. However, this is a small complaint and not a showstopper for me.

Given the Eee PC's limited screen resolution, one of the key factors in any Eee PC browser is its ability to zoom and deal with wide web pages. Using the Ctrl-Minus and Ctrl+Plus keystrokes, it's easy to increase and decrease the size of pages with text and graphics scaling in 10% increments.

You can download Opera from the Opera Download page.

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is a sensational browser. It's fast, offers good zoom for pages exceeding the Eee PC's display width and offers a familiar look and feel.

I know this will draw the ire of some quarters but without this excellent guide at Eeeuser I'd never had got it up and running. I needed to install the GTK 2 library (whatever the heck that is!), edit a script file and enter a bunch of commands in a terminal window.

Once it was installed, Firefox 3 was excellent to use.The page zoom in and out feature worked well.

Where Firefox beat Opera was its ability to render pages nicely. If you take a close look at the screen grab from Opera and compare it to Firefox, you'll notice that Firefox does a much nicer job of rendering fonts.

Conclusions

At the end of the day there are a couple of things that web browsers have to do. These are render pages correctly and be easy to use. At the end of the day, Firefox, while a little less refined in its default appearance (in my opinion) is certainly easy to use and it is better at rendering pages.

While Firefox was a pain to install I don't expect that it's a task I'll need to repeat often.

So, the winnder is Firefox 3 but not by a lot.

I recently purchased an Eee PC 4G (the model with a 7" display and 4GB of memory) on the cheap. My intent was to look at it for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I viewing it as a tool to help me in my study. In this guise, I'd use it for accessing the Bible (I'm studying theology) and for note taking. This means that I'd need to be able to install some extra software (there are several open source Bible study applications around that use public domain translations of the Bible) and type on it.

Secondly, I plan to use it for occasional web surfing and email access.. That's where the WiFi connection and, hopefully, 3G and Bluetooth support would be handy.

Thirdly, I attend a lot of meetings in my day job and I prefer to not carry printed papers to meetings. My preference is to take PDF or other documents with me as they're easy to annotate on the fly and my comments are kept with the original documents.

Finally, the built-in sound recording software was appealing as I could use it while interviewing folks and while at meetings and conferences.

After a couple of days of use I was totally frustrated - enough to use my soapbox at Hydrapinion for a rant titled "Eee PC proves why Linux blows". You see, installing extra applications to the Eee PC is a pain and, if you manage to install one, getting it to appear on the Eee's Easy Menu is something of a black art. Yeah, I know I can look to installing another operating system (there are several Linux distros focussed on the Eee PC and there are ways to install Mac OS X (don't bother, I did it and it was 20 minute experiment that on the 7: screen wasn't worth the effort) or Windows XP (you'll need a legitimate copy of XP SP2 for it work) but why should I have to do that to do, what on the face of things, looks to be a reasonably simple task.

Here's what I learned. Some of this will be dead obvious to those experienced in the use of Linux but given that the Eee PC isn't pitched specifically at Linux users but at consumer electronics customers after a low-cost computer, I think they're worth noting. Also, none of this stuff is my own work. I'll credit, where I can find them, the original sources of what I learned.

Starting the Terminal

Like it or not, getting the most out of Linux requires some access to the Terminal (Windows users would call this a DOS box or Command Prompt). The Eee PC's Easy Menu doesn't have a shortcut for launching the Terminal so you'll need to remember a keyboard shortcut.

To launch the Terminal press Ctrl+Alt+T

Enabling Desktop Mode

The Easy Mode, with it's large icons is great for quickly finding and launching applications. However, many would prefer a more usual desktop system. That's why you might like to enable the Full Desktop mode.

To enable Full Desktop mode

1 - Start a Terminal
2 - Enter the following commands

sudo bash
apt-get update
apt-get install ksmserver kicker

Note: When you run something commencing with "sudo", you're running it with full system access. Whatever you run as "sudo" will have access to the entire system. That means, if you don't know what you're doing, you can accidentally mess your system up quite badly.

Exit the Terminal (just type "exit") and then restart your Eee PC.

Now, when you press the power button, you'll have a button to run the Full Desktop, in addition to usual Stand By, Restart and Shut Down options.

As the Eee PC runs a version of the Linux distribution called Xandros that has a very strong resemblance to Windows XP. For many people, Full Desktop might be a more familiar experience and a preferred way of working. You can boot to the Full Desktop automatically by enabling it as a permanent option by going to Settings -> Personalisation and checking the Full Desktop option.

Source: My main source for this information was Eeeuser.org

Installing Applications

For Eee PC users, installing new applications is one of the confusing things they have to do. What makes it worse is that Easy Mode, even after a successful installation, doesn't provide easy access to the installed application.

In order to understand application installation I think a very short history lesson is in order. If you're a Windows or Mac user, you know that, even though new versions are released regularly, that the operating system is evolving in a single direction. Linux is different. Even though, many, many moons ago there was a single Linux, it's evolved so that there are several different types of Linux. Each type of Linux is called a distribution. Each different distribution has its own unique features.

What you need to know is that just because something works on one distribution Linux it doesn't necessarily mean that it'll work on all or any of the others. Now, the Eee PC runs a version of Xandros that's been customised for the Eee PC. Xandros is a Linux distribution that sprouted from Debian so what you find is that applications written for Xandros and Debian can usually work on the Eee PC.

I've had some success installing Debian applications

My operating system history starts at DOS 5 and Windows 3.0 and goes through all the flavours of Windows (except Windows ME thankfully). Also, I've been a Mac user for about five yearts so drag and drop installation is second nature. Essentially, that means that i'm used to running an installation package and having access to the installed application a few minutes later.

Linux is different as there are many ways to install applications. Firstly, you can download source code and compile it yourself. I have never done this and never expect to in my life. I won't be discussing this at all.

Secondly, you can run an application called Synaptic by going to the Terminal and entering the following.

sudo synaptic

This runs a program called Synaptic that makes program installation reasonably simple. Synaptic has a list of known program sources, called repositories, that are interrogated each time Synaptic is executed. This method works most of the time but is dependent on having enough "good" repositories in your list. There's a good article on how to do this over at eeeuser.com on how to do this along with a list of decent repositories.

If you're a Terminal or command line fan you can use the apt-get and install commands to install software. I'm not into the command line lifestyle so I'll point you to some clear instructions. Pop over to this page and scroll all the way to the bottom where the apt-get command is explained as well as how to use the command line to find software and to delete installed software.

My preferred method is to simply use Google. Search for the application type and find an installation that's distributed as a .deb file. For example, I installed the Opera web browser by visiting http://www.opera.com/download, choosing Xandros as my distribution and downloading Opera for Xandros 1.0 and 1.1 (the other version doesn't work on the Eee PC (or didn't for me).

By default, files download to the My Documents folder (you can launch the File Manager application from the Work tab of the Easy Menu - just in case you hadn't found that yet). Right click the downloaded .deb file and choose Install DEB file... from the menu. Then just follow the prompts and it's done

Running Applications

Having installed an application you'll want to actually use it. If you go to Full Desktop mode, you'll find you application under the Launch menu and looking through the Applications list. That's great if you're using the Full Desktop. If you're in Easy Mode it's a little trickier.

Open the File Manager. Go to the View menu and enable the "Show All File Systems" option. Expand the "All File Systems" branch of the file tree and then browse to "/usr/share/applications"

Note: file and folder names in Linux are case sensitive. That means that "usr" is different to "Usr".

From there, you can look through the list of installed programs to find your new applications.

Adding Applications to the Easy Mode Menu

The contents of the Easy Mode menu are managed, in typical Linux style, through a text file. This file is made up of structured content in an XML format. There's a tutorial on how to modify this using the Terminal and a text editor if you're so inclined. I'm not so I poked around, looking for a graphical tool that did this.

Go to the 3epc User Portal and download Launcher Tools. Install it (it comes in DEB package so you know how to do this) and a new icon, called "Launch Tools" appears on the Settings tab of the Easy Mode menu.

To add a new icon to the Easy Mode menu, launch the SimpleUI Editor. Choose the tab you wish to add your icon to (or add a new tab using the "Tab Management" option) and then right-click on some blank space to add a new program.

Given your new icon a name and then, in the "Command" section type the full path to the program you wish to launch from your new icon. For example, the path to Opera (on my system) is

/usr/share/applications/opera.desktop

Remember, this is case sensitive.

As you're entering it, text saying "Invalid Command" will appear below the command box. When you've entered a valid path, the text will automatically change to "Valid Command!" and be coloured green.

Creating your own custom icons is easy enough. There are excellent instructions and templates over at eeeuser.com. You can then use your own icons on the Easy Mode menu.

In closing...

One of the things I've learned over the last few days is that there's plenty of good information on using the Eee PC. However, most of it assumes some level of Linux knowledge. I've approached this form the point of view of the complete Linux newbie who's bought a consumer electronics device and wants to get a little more from it. Hence, I've not sought to do anything more technical than install some applications and add some icons so I can easily access the apps.

Incidentally, I've made considerable effort to not use anyone else's intellectual property in writing this post. Where an idea came from somewhere else I believe that I've credited it and provided some link love.