[HN Gopher] Asus Eee PC
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       Asus Eee PC
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2025-03-08 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | marssaxman wrote:
       | Loved my little Eee 901! It was the first computer I could treat
       | as a casual accessory, not just a precious piece of precision
       | equipment. I would take it anywhere - ski trips, the workshop,
       | the pub; I wrote a fair bit of code on that machine while sitting
       | at the bar down the street with a pint at my elbow. It was cheap
       | enough that I figured I could just buy another one, if it broke,
       | but it never did. I eventually graduated to second-hand
       | Thinkpads, a habit I've maintained ever since.
        
       | ndsipa_pomu wrote:
       | It's a shame that tablets have made this kind of form factor less
       | desirable (also Microsoft did hobble them by reducing Windows
       | licenses for them and thus the machines became less capable than
       | the Linux powered ones). I'm a big fan of UMPCs - there's
       | something very useful about having a physical keyboard so you can
       | do serious work when needed but don't want to carry around a
       | large laptop.
       | 
       | I've got a Chuwi Minibook (8inch screen) for that kind of usage
       | and happily runs Linux on it nowadays (older versions of Ubuntu
       | used to periodically hang which I believe was an issue with a
       | driver for the disk).
        
       | moritzwarhier wrote:
       | That was really a time to be alive. It was shortly after I moved
       | out from my parents and my mother got one instead of a tablet.
       | She's tech-savvy I have to say :)
       | 
       | All she wanted was an actually portable Windows device, and Asus
       | delivered.
       | 
       | Celeron was as hot as iPhone for a moment then! There was a real
       | hype around this device category ("Netbook" was the German
       | marketing term)
        
       | krapp wrote:
       | I dusted off my old 701 with Puppy Linux and it still boots. It's
       | a shame that model is _just_ too small to be useful to me.
       | 
       | It was perfect with fluxbox though (except for the size.)
        
         | K0balt wrote:
         | I still have several of the acre 7"-9" netbooks, waiting for a
         | mission in life.
        
       | howard941 wrote:
       | This puppy ran X on FreeBSD beautifully, touchpad and all. Very
       | handy for toting around to work offsite.
        
       | oniony wrote:
       | I didn't buy a Eee PC, instead picking up an Acer Aspire One.
       | Loved that little thing - it was great on the train - and was
       | very sad when Arch discontinied support for 32bit processors. By
       | that time the netbook market had died a death. (I, too, went to
       | second-hand Thinkpads at this point.)
        
       | roughly wrote:
       | It's a larger device, but I'm hoping the new Framework 12 comes
       | in at a price point to fill the "cheap hacker laptop" category.
       | The original eee was a fantastic "throw it in your bag & bring it
       | anywhere", and it all but required running Linux to get anything
       | out of it.
       | 
       | There was a brief side line on netbooks where you could swap in a
       | daylight-readable display of the sort used in the OLPCs, too, but
       | I never had the confluence of money, time, and availability to
       | make that happen.
        
       | CapricornNoble wrote:
       | I think mine had the CMOS battery fail and I never got around to
       | replacing it. Just pulled it out of a Rubbermaid container last
       | week and thought "man I should get this up and running again,
       | what a fun little cyberdeck it was."
       | 
       | This machine was key to helping me learn Backtrack Linux (Kali's
       | predecessor) and introduced me to Fluxbox.
        
       | IshKebab wrote:
       | I had one. IMO they were crap, and died out for good reason.
       | Cheap, but not good value because you never wanted to use one if
       | you could avoid it.
        
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       (page generated 2025-03-08 23:02 UTC)