European Wafaa

My freebie elfin eeePC-701 arrived last week, and I went straight ahead with geekifying it. Problem was I never actually gave the bundled Xandros based distro a chance. So I dutifully restored the machine to it's factory state, and looked around.

My first impression is that the child friendly tabbed interface is quite nice, my big gripe with it is the fact that they chose to rename the applications. For instance they have an icon for "Web" which is actually FireFox and most applications suffer the same fate, the other thing that would have been good would have been to use a standard icon set - along the lines of Tango or Oxygen would have been much better than their home grown Anime cross. Also why not make a descision on what DE they want to use, it is a real mix of GNOME and KDE - not necessarily a bad thing but the version of GNOME looks butt ugly and old (I may be spoiled with the sexy openSUSE masterpiece ), they have Thunderbird installed as the "E-Mail" client yet they have Korganizer (and friends) installed as the "PIM", surely it would have been better to use Kmail? Wow, I really sound bitchy. I honestly do like it and it suits the mass market audience pretty well, my 4yr old son could easily manage his way round it.

I have installed openSUSE 10.3 on to the machine but in a dual-boot setup, keeping the bundled distro on the built in 4GB SSD and putting the glorious green god onto an 8GB SDHC card. Why have I kept the (Xan)dross installed? Simple - a fall back should I bork something and want to confirm my breakage, also helps with upgrading the BIOS and keeps my warranty intact I'll post my trials/tribulations/tears/triumphs shortly. I'm almost 100% happy with it so I'll look at putting 11.0 on it soon, my 16GB card is on route to me which will be the new mainstay card till the 32GB cards come down in price.