Yvan Seth's Hole in the Internet

A quickie to show off some goodies we bought this month. Kat and I have mostly been using 3+ year old computers up 'til now. One of them, my laptop, was starting to get a bit cranky about been turned on even. So we bought a couple of laptops. A MacBook White, and an Asus Eee 901, now dubbed 'nik' & 'nak' respectively. Not exactly bleeding edge power, but good enough for the likes of us. Both units are very attractive to boot.

I haven't had much of a chance to play with the MacBook yet, but the Asus has already been integrated into my life (so much so that I think we might have to get a 2nd one for Kat, or she won't get much of a chance to use the little thing!) It slips into my backpack making very little difference to the weight. Can be yanked out and stuffed back in with ease on the train. It works perfectly with an Ubuntu Intrepid install (and the custom Eee kernel from array.org.) I've removed most of the gnome junk, and am running Xmonad as my WM – it is the perfect no-waste window manager for the Eee. Though I am running gnome-settings-manager in the background, as well as NetworkManager and nm-applet. These make roaming networking and application/X/whatever config management work wonderfully. As much as I despise gnome as a WM, the gnome/Ubuntu stuff for making configuration easy and automagic is excellent these days.

The Eee just keeps impressing me (and no, the keyboard isn't actually all that bad.) Today I tried running it with an external monitor. I had trouble at first since its 1024x768 rez made my 1280x1024 LCD monitors totally grumpy. Luckily I had an old analogue 1024x768 LCD stashed away, I plugged it in and configured resolutions with gnome-display-settings. It asked me to restart X, this I did, and was amazed. I was expecting a mirrored display… but what I got was dual-head! Working beautifully too, very nice in a vertical configuration with the Eee below the monitor.

It does remind me of just how bad analogue LCD image qualify is though – and to think we used to think it was nice!

Both machines have had their RAM maxed out too now, 2GB in the Eee, 4GB in the MacBook (RAM from a 3rd party to avoid extortionate pricing!)

Anyway, here's a dodgey photo:

nik & nak