One-third of Asus Eee PC users to run Linux

I've been a Linux user for over 10 years, so i'm not suffering from a Windows bias. In truth, hate windows and rejected it from its earliest introduction.

Do have a problem with this EEE laptop, though. Heavy use, i.e., 24/7, many Firefox tabs, streaming radio, OpenOffice will lock the machine or OS after a few hours and require a restart. The radio may still be active, but the keyboard and mouse are dead, with the exception that I can still click the restart icon.

My configuration is the basic 512mb machine with an added monitor, keyboard, mouse, usb 2G stick and printer.

So, is the hardware simply not robust enough, or is this version of Linux unable to support such heavy activity. Have run the same environment on other desktops and laptops.

Maybe, in this case, Windows XP is the better choice. Certainly, I'm considering it.

Bill

Firefox is notorious for memory leaks, or excuse me, technically they're not memory leaks but something different that acts just the same, anyway the firefox team only recently even admitted there was a problem, after years of denial. I don't know if it's fixed yet. A simple test is don't use it and see what happens.

That is wimpy hardware for such demanding uses; you hit a triple- heavy I/O, memory, and CPU. Why would XP be better instead of adding more RAM? It's not going to perform under those loads any better.

Though you must admit this little machine does have one amazing superpower- overcoming your ten years of Windows hatred.

From the description, it sounds like your running out of memory (which is locking the machine), however, you may also have a temperature related hardware problem with your machine.

Wow, just goes to show how skewed my perspective can get- that's not really all that wimpy. I have an old Thinkpad running a mobile Pentium 1.4 and 256 MB RAM, and it runs both XP and Fedora 8, which is fairly fat and bloaty, acceptably. So the Ee isn't that wimpy. Never mind what I said. jdixon's right, both heat and memory shortage are the likely culprits.

No, no, no! Didn't overcome my hatred of all things Windows. You're probably right, Windows wouldn't perform any better.

billbar, I dunno if it would. I just have a small seizure when someone says "windows." Sorry :)

They're fixing lots of memory issues in Firefox 3. I've been playing with the beta a bit and it doesn't eat all my RAM after a couple days anymore.

One of the articled lxer linked to a few weeks back or some such talked about it a little.

From the eWeek.com article.

Quoting:The Taiwan company's branded business last year launched a 7-inch child-friendly Linux-based personal computer priced as low as $200, and new models with Microsoft's Windows XP will be priced around $390 to $400.

Note the price difference. If you were shopping around, but knew nothing about operating systems, which one would you be inclined to buy?