<incom> jaromil about the eeepc laptop

[Geert Lovink]

EEEPC cheap GNU/Linux laptop

http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/eeepc.html

The EEEPC is the travelling deck in my first Indonesian travel. This 
new 7" Asus model is amazingly cheap: I bought it in Singapore in 
December 2007 for 600 SGD, approx 300 EUR, while the predicted cost in 
Indonesia is 3 millions IDR.

It is completely solid state and comes equipped with a Pentium M with 
512 of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, has wifi modem and ether-net, 
usb2.0, sound-card and even a web-cam. I place my bet this machine is 
going to break through the market in the coming year. Ready to be used 
when bought, it comes with a user friendly installation of Xandros 
(Debian based) well configured for a newbie or anyone used to work on 
M$ wind-blows. I didn't really kept the original system intact, instead 
worked on tweaks since the very first day, now it fits almost perfectly 
my geeks needs: GCC and Emacs running very smooth on it... once I'm 
back in EU i might find the time to release a new distribution ;)

This computer alone makes it worth to visit Singapore these days, 
especially considering that in Europe is not yet available on the 
consumer market (started shipping in UK the 16 November for educational 
institutions only ). Superior by far to whatever the OLPC will become: 
this is not a toy for kids, it's a real computer and there is not 
top-down control on its distribution and development, it just hits the 
market and you can buy it cheap, that's it. Hope will be so in Europe 
soon, else I'll have to carry back too many for friends and I'm not so 
familiar with customs.