My first disappointment is that it was delivered without the just-as-beautiful assistant.
Five minutes of looking at the Xandros OS that comes pre-installed from Asus and I fully agreed with one writer who described it as a Fisher-Price toy OS.
Without hesitation I reformatted the 8+32GB SD drives and installed the copy of Ubuntu-Eee that I had prepared before the new notebook arrived. That was when I had my second disappointment - neither the Wireless nor the wired network devices were recognized by Ubuntu. It seems that the special version was designed for the earlier models of the Asus Eee PC. Learning more made me realize that the model 1000 is bleeding edge as far as development of a compatible version of Ubuntu is concerned. Many users are still experimenting with varying degrees of success.
While learning how to get Ubuntu to work on this new baby I decided to restore the Xandros back to factory default. The Eee PC comes with a recovery DVD that makes this a simple 10 minute procedure. You do, of course, require a USB DVD drive - not included with the Eee.
I battled with the "Easy Mode" Xandros user interface for a while longer - trying to find the underlying Linux, It took an Internet search to learn how to open a terminal window - Ctrl-Alt-T. Once in a terminal I could install the required parts that allowed access to the "Advanced Mode" user interface. The advanced mode user interface is scaringly similar to Windows 98. It is not surprising that Microsoft have chosen Xandros for a broad collaboration agreement.
Compared to Ubuntu, the Xandros repositories are out of date and incomplete. The menus were not customizable and, in my opinion, badly designed. But in spite of my complaints, it is a lot more usable than the "Easy Mode". The real killer however is the flakiness of the wireless network and the inability to mount another file system using SSH (it offers the aging NFS mounts instead). It also seemed much slower than what I expected - hopefully that is due to the bad wireless connection. I did manage to do a bit of work under Xandros - although 'bit' is too big a description. I have just downloaded Ubuntu 8.04.1 and I am going to tackle the installation of compatible drivers. If I can pull myself away from the fun games on Xandros.
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Do you suffer from depression or mood swings? Do you feel victimized and bullied? Do you find that you are unproductive? Do you sometimes feel like attacking your computer with an axe? Then try Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a non-chemical substitute for the potentially dangerous and expensive drug, Prozac.
After using Ubuntu for just a few weeks you will be feeling happier and more relaxed, mood swings will be a thing of the past, your productivity will rise to new heights and your love for your computer will be renewed.
Caution: Ubuntu can be addictive. However there are a number of support groups to help Ubuntu addicts.
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"Your computer may need to restart a few times to complete the installation process" - Microsoft
The suffering that some people are willing to endure!
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