Asus Eee PC: Day 2 Tips and Tricks
Still loving my Asus Eee PC. Check it out. It’s the perfect size to strap onto my bike rack for the daily commute:
One thing I forgot to mention about the Eee yesterday: when it’s sitting in your lap, if the screen is pushed back much farther than 90 degrees, the weight of the screen plus the battery being located at the screen hinge makes it begin to tilt backwards when your hands aren’t holding it in place. Note: this only happens when it’s in my lap. On flat surfaces it firmly remains in place. Even in my lap, it’s not like it’s flipping backwards. It just slowly tilts back on the battery / hinge.
I haven’t installed any new OSes yet, as there seem to be a few bumps with all of them and Xandros is working nicely enough so far. When someone gets a nicely ironed out port of Ubuntu running on the Eee, I’ll probably go for that.
In any case, here’s some cool tips that take reading to find anywhere else (but which I found mostly over at Eeeuser Wiki:
1. Hold Alt while clicking to move over-sized windows: If you install any non-default packages on the Eee, most likely some of the window default sizes will be taller than the Eee’s screen height.
2. F11 toggles Firefox into fullscreen mode.
3. Shift + Insert pastes text into a terminal.
4. Get eeecamtray by Berkus for easy and quick enabling and disabling of the built in webcam. I was able to install the new Skype beta that has video support and using this tool made it work nicely (although, I still cannot get the flash plugin in Firefox to recognize the camera properly for posting videos to YouTube or Seesmic. I still need to try Sean’s recommendation of simply recording the vid locally and then uploading to Seesmic).
I also hooked this up to a 24-inch monitor today and it worked fine (though a bit stretched on such a large monitor). More tomorrow, I’m sure…
Oh, one complaint: hibernate doesn’t work, so the only option to preserve battery power is to shut down fully (setting up some swap space should fix this).
Also: anyone know of a good solar powered / crank powered battery that could be used to power this puppy and keep it off the power grid?
December 5th, 2007 at 5:04 am
I have been thinking of getting one of these, it looks really good. What is the best thing about the computer?
December 13th, 2007 at 5:04 am
The best thing about this laptop would have to be its versatility, mine is great, I just love it!!!!!!!
December 22nd, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Another great thing is … it makes learning new things in ‘Linux’ fun, cause to get the most out of this PC you’ll be using the Console windows lots more..
Also - i recommend switching to the Advanced Mode OS, ( where it resembles windows.. with a ’start’ button and program menu etc) - this is much better than the factory default with its MASSIVE !!! icons.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Great tips, i found all information i was looking for, i will use some of them.