Iguleder's Blog

I bought a new Asus Eee PC 1001PX two days ago. I must admit this is the ideal netbook for me: it has Bluetooth, a good wireless card, a superb matte screen and a comfortable keyboard. Also, there are three bonuses: a carbon-fiber pattern, a good internal speaker and a low price.

My original intention was to buy the 1005P, but they didn’t have it in stock. It features the new Seashell design: it’s glossy and looks more childish in my opinion. The worker at the store told me they don’t have it, but they can order it. I asked him about the Acer Aspire One 532h they bragged with on their site and suddenly, the other worker who had no customers interrupted and told him they do have the 1001.

The worker told me it’s identical to the 1005P, but it has a different design and two USB ports instead of the traditional 3. He showed me some pictures on his screen and the other worker said that the difference of 40 NIS ($10) is twice the price of a USB port multiplier, so it’s worth it. I went for the 1001PX and also bought a MSI mouse with a retractable wire. I had no choice but to pay for Windows 7 Starter. Dang.

Well, I’m the adventurous type, so here’s what I’ve been through with the Eee so far:

• It had a 15 GB FAT partition with a 7.5 GB of recovery stuff, including Windows 7 Starter. I have only two flash drives – 2 GB and 4 GB. I had to make an image of the partition using dd, then gzip it and split into 5 1.8 GB parts, so I can transport it using them. I did that, then merged the parts and the MD5 of the gzipped image was correct. Then, I repartitioned the drive and installed Fedora, Puppeee and Lucid Puppy 5.1 beta 3.
• For some reason, all the distros I use have either 2.6.33.x or 2.6.32.x and I can’t use my earphones because my netbook model came out after these kernels: I need 2.6.34.x or above, because they already recognize my model as an option for snd-hda-intel, the sound card. Each netbook manufacturer or model has its own ways of switching between the internal speaker and the audio jack. I forced the module to see my Eee as a Fujitsu LIFEBOOK through /etc/modprobe.d; the earphones and speaker switching thingy worked, but the built-in microphone was gone. If I let it detect my hardware automatically, I can’t use the earphones but I have the microphone. I’m currently trying to download some Fedora 14 or Ubuntu 10.10 snapshots (no, I don’t use Ubuntu), because these are the only distros I know with at least 2.6.34.
• I tried to update the BIOS yesterday to fix problems with hotkeys and just because I wanted to take this risk. For some reason it failed and the netbook didn’t boot: nothing on the screen and no battery indicator. Then, I noticed I hear that voice I hear each time I access the hard drive, that tiny click sound. I plugged in the flash drive I used for the flashing and surprisingly, it started the BIOS update utility and used the ROM on it. I gave the new BIOS another shot, but it failed again. I decided to downgrade back to the BIOS version the Eee came with and things are fine now.

I’ll post an extensive review soon.