Gaved Scoop: Hands-on Linux £199 Asus Eee MiniBook

Here’s Mark Gaved with his fresh-out-of-the-box RM Asus MiniBook (AKA the Asus ‘EEE’ PC 701). He bought one straight from RM in the UK as a pilot machine for some nifty handheld science project work he and colleagues are undertaking (described in a story over at KMi Planet).

Boot up from cold start to fully functioning GUI took about 20 seconds.

We spent roughly two minutes hammering a few applications very quickly, including Firefox, YouTube, Open Office (creating some Word-style tables and a few Excel sheets), etc etc.

No question about it: this is the real deal. Mine should arrive within about five days, hopefully, and I’ll file a more in-depth report.

Oh, and the total cost? £199 + VAT

In the photo we’ve plugged it into my giant ancient wall-mounted display and external speakers – no fuss, no prep, no cheating: does what it says on the tin. Locates the wireless network, surfs the web, runs the Open Office suite, just as promised – even better than I expected, to tell the truth. Yeah, the keyboard is small – duh, what did you expect? Stay tuned for detailed hammering.

UPDATE 1: check out this post from tnkgrl Mobil for some nice personal comments and unboxing photos – much more interesting to me than the BIG reviews that sound too much like a replay of the brochure specs.

UPDATE 2: even better than Gizmodo’s 9-reviews-of-Asus roundup, there are some much more interesting Asus PC 701 EEE serious hack/mod sites:

• Downloadsquad: up close with the Eee – Installing unsupported programs
• Brand Linder’s blog: Eee PC: Enabling full desktop mode
• NotebookReview’s Asus Eee PC Tweak Guide [Highly recommended]

Great stuff! (Thanks to Mark Gaved for bringing the Asus to my attention in the first place, for obtaining one so quickly, and for pointing out many of the links above).

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