EeePC with Xandros - long live Asus

I hate its keyboard. Horrible. And I don't mean the size, but quality. Most keys refuse to work unless you hit them with just the right amount of pressure, and jut the right angle. What a shame, because otherwise my new toy is an absolute treasure. There, there; got the bad out of the way.

Now I can concentrate on the good. To my mind the little EeePC is a perfect cross between a light, small, beautifully equipped sub-notebook with a perfectly selected set of simply presented open source operating system and applications.

Just been on two-week holidays, traveling across Europe. My "eepsy" did the trick - as a fast communicator (complete with video conferencing, thanks to the camera), storage device for photographs, work tool for quick write-ups, internet radio provider, and a source of endless penguin racing activity for a bored two-years-old, who had never seen the game before, yet was racing within seconds.

Xandros based EeePC might do more for popularising Linux that all remaining distributions put together - although admittedly for all the wrong reasons: many people will not even realise they have Linux! I have seen EeePC/Xandros being used by people who used to shiver at the mere sound of the word Linux.

What is best about it? Apart from the almost a pocket size and weight? Well, this is the first machine, Linux or otherwise, that had all facilities work out of the box. Totally intuitive, typical PDA-style front end, the easiest device to use by a mile.

Mind you, it took me two days to find access to CLI, but then again this was out of curiosity rather than necessity (press CTR-ALT-T, in case you wonder).

I'm probably being unfair to other distributions (like Ubuntu, which is my current favourite, for reasons I might explain separately).

After all EeePC/Xandros was fine-tuned for the specific hardware - a luxury that few distributions can afford...