Adventures By Design

In which our Eee PC is barely resurrected from the dead.

Today was lazy. It was wonderful. The excitement of Song Kran is taking it’s toll on us. Although we try to maintain a positive attitude, it is getting a little annoying that whenever you leave your hotel, you are guaranteed to get soaked. Most people generally confine their water dousing to the daylight hours, but some continue to splash you into the evening. We’ve found that the foreigners are worse for this than the Thais.

We started the computer this morning and encountered our first problems with the Eee PC. To refresh your memory, after searching everywhere, and falling victim to poor business practices via Ebay, Gin bought a micro computer, about the size and weight of a hard-cover book, called an Eee PC. In general, Gin’s Eee PC has performed perfectly, and has made keeping in touch while traveling easy and enjoyable. Every day we write in our travelogue (the document that becomes this blog), and when we have internet access, we post a few day’s worth of our latest missives. The Eee PC has performed well, connecting via wireless and wired to the internet without fuss, reading and writing to our 8Gb SD card without delay, and shutting down and starting up quickly. The reason the Eee PC is so solid and fast is that its operating system is a version of Linux called Debian. Unfortunately, despite making significant inroads into the consumer market, Linux is not so easy to learn, especially for timid or novice computer users. The difficulties of using Linux seem directly in conflict with Asus’s marketing campaign which touts the Eee PC as “Easy to Learn, Easy to Work, Easy to Play” (hence the three Es).

One major area that needs improvement is the way the Eee PC handles installing software. Although the Eee PC ships from the factory with many useful programs, including Firefox, Open Office, and Skype, the included paint programs (Paint, and Tux Paint) aren’t very robust. We needed a graphics program that could do something extremely basic—save as a JPEG—but neither of these could. Why Asus didn’t bundle Gimp is a mystery; Gimp is the open-source standard graphics manipulation program, widely recognized as a capable substitute for Photoshop.

Anyways, we decided we wanted to install some new software on the Eee PC. First, you have to research on the internet what to do, because the electronic and print manuals provided by Asus include only rudimentary tech support. Armed with this knowledge, you have to modify a couple text files, then you have to execute a command line. Overall it wasn’t difficult, but it required a level of technical background knowledge that most folks don’t have; of all our friends and family, only a handful would be able and willing to go through all the trouble. You have to stay organized and focused, and not lose your nerve, in light of the fact that if you screw something up, you will likely mess up the whole computer and have to reinstall the operating system.

Once we learned how, we installed Gimp last night without a hitch. Unfortunately, in the process of downloading and unzipping the necessary files, we filled our hard drive to a dangerous level. Unknown to us (and unmentioned in the Eee PC manual), when the Eee PC starts up, it needs a certain amount (40 Mb?) of hard drive space. When the Eee PC attempted to start up this morning, it was strangled by the lack of space. This caused it to get stuck in a boot-up loop, where it got to the same place in the start-up sequence, ground to a halt, and restarted the sequence again. We knew that one way to fix the problem was to reinstall the operating system, which is amazingly easy to do: the Eee PC keeps an image file of the initial install safely hidden in a partition. Just hit F9 during startup, and you can have your Eee PC back to the way it came out of the box. The downside is that we’d lose all our personal data, including 600Mb of photos, our travel blog, and our travel budget.

Ric spent some time in the hotel’s internet cafe, and figured out a way to bypass the start-up loop, and access the hard drive. He could then find a few large sacrificial files, delete them, and free up some hard drive space. After that the Eee PC rebooted fine. And we didn’t lose all our data.

A few days later Ric was exploring how to customize the look of the Eee PC, and found the options for changing the desktop wallpaper. He wanted to surprise Gin by setting the wallpaper to change itself every ten minutes or so, displaying photos from our vacation. Unfortunately, the Eee PC did not like this, and refused to start-up correctly. Every time it got to the “Loading desktop” part of the sequence, it would hang, and refuse to continue. This time nothing we tried would work, so with annoyance, we reinstalled the OS, and lost all our personalized settings, including Gimp. Thankfully, we had learned our lesson about saving to the hard drive, and all our personal files were on our removable SD card.

So, how do we feel about the Eee PC? Overall, we applaud Asus for taking consumer electronics in this direction, and we are excited to see (and possibly purchase) the next generation Eee PC, which will have a larger screen (9″), more RAM, and a bigger hard drive (12 or 20Gb). The Eee PC’s small size, light weight, and general ease of use make it a great option for folks who want a computer for email and word processing, but don’t desire the processing power, weight, and cost of a full laptop. Nonetheless, until its technical problems are addressed, we feel that its slogan “Easy to Learn, Easy to Work, Easy to Play” remains more of an aspiration on the horizon than a reality at your fingertips.