Last week, I received my Woot special Asus Eee PC 900. Since I'm a fairly non-standard computer user, I wanted to give myself some time to get things setup, before writing a review. There are still more things to do, but I have a reasonably usable machine now. What I got has:

• 512MB DDR2 533 RAM
  
• 4GB SSD
  
• 1024x600 9" color LCD
  
• 3 high-speed USB ports
  
• 900 MHz Celeron-M ULV 353 CPU
  
• 2 speakers, microphone, headphone, and mic-jack
  
• trackpad
  
• a very tiny power adaptor, 12V 3A
  
• a bunch of paper and cardboard
  

The Woot version is refurbished, and different “deals” seem to come in different configurations. They are all much smaller than standard versions that you buy, which essentially means that the Woot deals aren't really all that good of a deal.

The native ASUS-customized Xandros barely fits on the 4GB drive. To be honest, I didn't play with it very much. It asked for a password, which I apparently mistyped twice the same way, and was unable to ever log in. I plugged in a USB harddrive, and used it to make a basic Gentoo install. After that worked, I migrated it to the SSD and now run natively.

I discovered that I had a 1GB DDR2 667 SO-DIMM sitting around from another upgrade, which worked fine. I've ordered a 32GB SSD from Crucial for about US$90. Until I get the new SSD, I have /usr/portage and /usr/src/linux symlinked to directories on an external thumb drive. This allows me to mount the drive when I want to emerge or update the kernel, but otherwise use the machine without it.

The keyboard took some getting used to. The pitch is smaller, and the “edge” keys are significantly smaller. At first, it was hard to go back and forth with a regular keyboard, but I'm fine with that now. It's definitely usable, but not exactly natural or pleasant. I haven't spent much time coding to see how hard the punctuation is to use.

But, importantly, the switches in the keys are good. I used another one in Best Buy (not sure which brand it was), and the keys themselves were unusable. It wasn't just a wear issue because all of the switches had the same inconsistent feel.

I used it today as my work laptop, and it was fine for email checking and basic web browsing during meetings. The small form factor makes it much easier to carry around.

The Ratpoison window manager is a good fit with the tiny screen. With a larger screen, I tend to use xmonad since it is better at tiling and handling multiple desktops, but the single window at a time works nicely with such a small screen. Xfce's Terminal program using DejaVu Sans Mono 9, with sub-pixel anti-aliasing is nice and readable. Gentoo is nice enough to let me build just the terminal emulator without bringing in the rest of Xfce, or any other desktop manager.

The main thing I'm disappointed with so far is that the ACPI battery monitor doesn't provide all that much information. It reports a design capacity of 5200 mAh, but a last full capacity of 100 mAh. This appears to be so that the remaining capacity gets reported as a percentage. There isn't a lot of precision to it; the numbers always being multiples of 10. There also doesn't appear to be any kind of current metering, which makes estimating remaining time difficult.

I had no particular difficulty getting my Verizon EvDO USB card working, which gives me net access in most places. The WiFi also seems to work fine. I'm still setting things like mplayer and Skype up, so I don't have enough information to review the multi-media capabilities of the machine.

All in all, I'm reasonably happy with the machine. I'll know more after I try actually travelling with it. I'm looking forward to having a computer small enough to actually open on modern airplane seating.