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.
The Open University is evaluating using these machines for the Personal Inquiry project, where the machine is to be used in helping children with their fieldwork in science. Mark Gaved and Trevor Collins are in the team that are investigating using this machine for this project and they are rightly excited by its potential. They were wondering how far it could be pushed and very generously gave me the chance to take it for a test drive. Thanks guys!
There are lots of reviews of the machine out there and I don't really want to write another one, so instead I will focus on what is possible with the machine. The short answer to this question is "a lot"! The long answer will be spread over several blog postings, with screenshots (as it is Christmas).
So the first thing I tried on it was to try something you would think would not work on a machine like this: Second Life, but you know what, it works!
The screenshot above was taken on the EEE itself. To get this to work I downloaded the Linux client from the Second Life site and then just extracted the files and ran it. It helped to turn down all the options for graphic details to minimum. Admittedly the client is a little slow but did seem to work a little better with a good network connection and Mesa 3d installed.
After trying this experiment, I could't help wondering what else it could do. How about watching live streamed TV? Well you can do that too. I added the the Debian Multimedia repository to the apt sources list on the machine and installed RealPlayer. The BBC have recently make a live stream of of News 24 available. Amazingly the machine coped with the video stream without any problems, both vision and video were synchorised. The only problem was that it was News 24, which is a bit dull, but it shows that the device is fast enough to handle live streaming television and radio.
Check back soon to read more about what the Asus EEE PC is capable of.
EEE and SL
Hi,
Im a little bewildered,
I own a 2G Surf eee pc and the graphics chip reports as GMA900,
on the SL technical requirements page it states that incompatible with anything that reports as GMA945 or below, and indeed when it try to run SL the error message confirm that the card is incompatible...
Are you using the default linux IS that ships with the eee ? also what model eee did you try this on ??
Ta
RE: EEE and SL
I tried it out on a 4G 701 model with Xandros (the default operating system) still installed. The graphics card on my 4G reports as an Intel 915GM, so it sounds like the graphics on the 4G might be slightly higher spec?
Re: Fun with the Asus EEE PC Part 1
I'd read another review that advised setting the Second Life clipping distance to 64m and said they spent most of their time in their "sky-house", but given all that, now that you've had the chance to play with it a bit, would you still rate Second Life as do-able on the Eee-PC? I also hear that Asus plans a new model to be released this April, but haven't yet confirmed where that machine may be available or anything on specs or price.
what about the low-res Flash video streaming sites like YouTube, GoogleVideo or the hi-res servers like Guba or Crunchyroll? Can you play downloaded AVI files and have the sound stay sync'd?
It does look like a very inviting machine, and dreamkitty.com is selling them here in Canada for just $399, which is about half the price of the minimum laptop.
Re: Fun with the Asus EEE PC Part 1
Hi mrG,
To be honest I haven't tried SecondLife much since initially installing it, but a thread will a method of how to get it running has appeared on the EEEPC Forum: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=14280 so this might offer better performance that just doing a simple install like I did.
When using it I found it to be a little slow, but there again so was Google Earth when installed as default, when a patch was applied it was very usable.
If anybody reading this has experience running SecondLife on the EEEPC, how have you found it? What did you have to do to make it work well on the EEEPC?
I haven't tried AVI files, but YouTube was fine on the machine and very watchable.
Re: Fun with the Asus EEE PC Part 1
The only features missing from the Eee PC that really stand out are the lack of Bluetooth 2.0 and the lack of a Verizon or Sprint wireless card option. If Asus can find a way to add these features to the Eee PC we will go as far as to say, “No home should be without an Eee PC.” As it stands now, the Eee PC is a truly impressive ultraportable with a value much higher than the sale price suggests. The Eee PC can't replace a full-featured desktop or notebook, but it makes the perfect choice if you are in the market for an ultraportable notebook for school, work, or vacation.
Re: Fun with the Asus EEE PC Part 1
I'm not a second life user but its good to know that the Eee has the graphics power to pull it off!
Re: Fun with the Asus EEE PC Part 1
Hey that looks great! The new Eee PC's are even more powerful! Maybe they run half life! hehe!