Asus 9 inch Netbook

LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2010 A few weeks ago I was chatting with one of our Clients, he owns a company that does hooks up for prospective Employers with prospective Employees in the Fitness Industry, and in the process makes a few bob. He was complaining about his Asus netbook, which had Windows XP loaded on it, and how it has been getting progressively slower over time and knowing I use Linux, in fact I had recommended last year that he get someone, or do it himself and install Ubuntu UNR. He asked if I would install Linux on his machine.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with one of our Clients, he owns a company that does hooks up for prospective Employers with prospective Employees in the Fitness Industry, and in the process makes a few bob. He was complaining about his Asus netbook, which had Windows XP loaded on it, and how it has been getting progressively slower over time and knowing I use Linux, in fact I had recommended last year that he get someone, or do it himself and install Ubuntu UNR. He asked if I would install Linux on his machine.

The Machine originally had Linux on it, that horrible monstrosity based on Xandros that Asus had shipped, and as he had not been able to add any useful applications had elected to get someone to install Windows on it. Well Windows has finally bitten him on the bum. He said he liked the Linux install up until the point he wanted to do something that Asus had decided their customers were never going to do. Then he hated it not because it was hard to use or was unstable, but because he was fenced in, chained to Asus's vision of what he should do with his computer.

He lives in Melbourne, and I'm a 4 hours drive North of Brisbane, and the whole state of New South Wales sits somewhere in the middle. Not detered he posts the machine to me, with return post included. So now I have a little Asus in my possession. It really is a cute little machine with the same resolution as the bigger 10 Inch model, you can almost carry it in your back pocket.

The Machine has a 20 Gig SSD with 16 Gig assigned to the C "Drive" and 4 Gig to the D "Drive". Windows and the applications take up most of the 16 Gig partition, leaving 4 Gig for everything else. I reckon we can do much better than that with Ubuntu - I have a truckload of applications including both GNOME and KDE4 runtimes and Games - on my laptop, and I'm only using 11 Gig, I reckon even if I throw in the kitchen sink we won't use much more than 4 Gig for the OS and applications together.

So here we go..