I finally took the plunge the other day and decided to wipe the operating system that came with my EEE PC and install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and I'm very glad I did! I've been using it for a few days now and am really pleased with it, the new interface performs excellently on the small seven inch screen of the EEE and the time and thought the designers have put into how to make the maximum use of screen-size has certainly paid off. A particularly noticeable example is when using Mozilla Thunderbird, on the OS supplied with the EEE was was virtually no room to type a message when starting a new email, the design of the netbook interface means that there is now quite a bit of space. Installing Ubuntu on the EEE was not a straightforward process with a lot of manual adjustments that had to be applied, but there is a lot of good documentation of there that really helps and it seems quite a community of people running Ubuntu on their EEEs.

Asus have released a free SDK for their popular EEE PC. The SDK also includes a facilty to generate a VMWare image of an EEE from the support DVD supplied with the machine or with an image of that DVD. The SDK and an image of the support DVD can be downloaded from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=215613. As the Asus EEE PC uses the Linux operating system an SDK is not absolutely necessary for software development as everything you need could probably be obtained within your favourite distribution, so the emphasis in this SDK might be a little bit different to what you are used to. What Asus have supplied is a complete environment to create applications, so the SDK DVD is an installer disk for Xandros Open Circulation Edition (a free version of their product) which has the Eclipse IDE built into it, some tools for developing with Qt, and a Xandros produced package maker. So the idea is you can burn the image to a DVD and boot your computer with that and then you can get straight on with some development. You can also run the SDK in a virtual machine as well.

If you have recently been studying a course on OpenLearn you might have noticed the link to "Knowledge Maps" at the top left. This takes you to a page with resources for a special version of the Compendium software adapted for OpenLearn. The Compendium-OpenLearn software is explained more fully at http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?name=KM. I've been becoming increasingly interested in these sorts of mind mapping programs in the last few months and have found that it has many uses not just for your studies but can be used when you are trying to visualise ideas, or work out structures that help solve problems.

The Asus EEE is without doubt an excellent machine, it may also hold some wider lessons for the future. It is lightweight, a convenient size (about the size of a book), lightweight (about 900g) and extremely versatile (see my previous posts). It feels very solid and would be perfect for someone who might have to travel a lot or attend a lot of meetings.

Admittedly, I didn't actually try to put the EEE into a handbag, but a couple of people very enthusiastically mentioned that such a feat would be possible. Now of course as I'm sure you know there are few subjects more serious than servers, this is the impression I have got over the years from sysadmins suspicious of developers! So we ought to see if some serious technology works on the machine, could we really use it as a web server? Or a database server? Maybe even for Drupal?

The EEE isn't just for having fun, one of those Es stands for Easy to work. I decided that it was time to go on a road test so I popped the EEE into the glove box of my car and went to meet my good friend Amanda D'Silva. I asked her to have a go on it as she is someone who is very familiar with MS Office(tm) and in her role as a communications manager she often has to put together reports and presentations both in the office and sometimes on the move.

The EEE does lots more fancy multimedia stuff. One great program that is on board already is Amarok (although it has been renamed Music Manager here). This has got to be one of the greats of the open source world. Through this application you can listen to your music collection, listen to internet radio, subscribe to podcasts and it integrates with last.fm (so you can listen to streams and scrobble tracks).

I've just had the good fortune to have been able to borrow one of these magnificient little machines for the weekend. For those of you haven't heard the Asus EEE PC is an ultramobile laptop. Think "Honey I shrunk the laptop" and you'll have a good picture of it.