It's tax season again and I got money back, not a very large amount but enough to cover a new budget netbook. With the budget in mind and the goal of long battery life I did my research and it was clear that the Asus EeePC 1001P (160gb version) was going to be top notch for the price. This little netbook (that I'm making this blog post from) is powered by the latest Intel N450 Pineview processor which offers some attractive bits in terms of battery life and form factor since it allows for a 6 cell battery that is almost entirely flush with the body of the netbook. For under $300 (USD) it is advertised to get up to 11 hours of battery life and is showing between 8 and 9 hours of battery life in real world usage.
I ordered it off Amazon.com and it arrived via FedEx on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and as per the included documentation it needed to charge for 8 hours before its first use. While I don't entirely trust or believe the battery needs that much time sitting on a charger I decided to play it safe. Once that horrible waiting period was over I was finally able to get it powered up and get Fedora 13 Beta installed. I was lucky enough to guess the right BIOS key so that I could get this little guy to boot from the USB stick with Fedora 13 Beta on it before Windows 7 (that came pre-loaded on this) ever got the chance to infect my CPU and other components.
Fedora 13 Beta installation went fine, but upon reboot the wireless card was not detected at all which was discouraging as all I could find on the internet were sources of needing to use ndiswrapper to make it function. Now, Fedora being notorious for leading the way and keeping in mind that I'm running a development build I had the bright idea to plug it into an ethernet port in order to download updates that have been rolling out as the bug squashing ninjas (Read: Fedora Contributors) find and fix problems in preparation for stable release.
Downloads done, presto rebuilds done, package installs done, reboot, wifi!!!
So here I am on my brand new netbook running Fedora 13 Beta + updates with *everything* fully functional and I couldn't be happier. One last piece is to find out why gnome-shell won't run but from what I understand its a graphics card specific bit because there are lots of reports of people having it up and running on other systems which is only a minor set back as gnome-shell is only a tech preview and is under heavy development itself. All in all, I'm extremely satisfied with Fedora 13 Beta + updates as well as with my Asus EeePC 1001P. Only recommendation I'd have to anyone in the market for one of these EeePC 1001P netbooks is to test out the keyboard, its just a preference thing. I like the keyboard on this quite a bit but I know of some who aren't fans so be sure to give it a test run before sinking the cash in.
Final words: Fedora continues to kick hind parts and take names, everything on this brand new netbook is working wonderfully and I couldn't be happier. Many thanks to all those involved in making my computing experience this amazing!
-AdamM
9 comments:
Hmm. I got mine at the end of March (haven't gotten around to posting about it yet) and suspend doesn't work at all on mine (starts to go to sleep and hangs before it actually gets there; near impossible to debug). The Atheros 9k chipset didn't work with anything under 2.6.34 (and the wireless toggle also triggered the wired port for whatever reason, having the driver decouples them) and I'm still running a rawhide kernel actually. Maybe I should try bumping to the next F13 kernel to try wireless/suspend combination there.
Mathstuf
I actually have had success with suspend on mine. I've only done it a few times but it did work when I tried it so it might just be that I've been fortunate and haven't run into the issue yet or it's been fixed in F13 Beta in updates or updates-testing. Best of luck!
-AdamM
Could you please mention what is the graphic chip /v card on this netbook as even the official Asus web site does not provide this bit of information and I am looking for new netbook for my mom, but what she does is sometimes play a small game that require some 3d (works on i855GM so it should work on anything that has 3d capabilities but I want to know what exactly they have put in this model)
Thanks
What about battery life?
Hmmm - I hope you asked Amazon to refund the Microsoft Tax?
They have for me and have continued to do so for many others...
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2009/07/21/getting-your-microsoft-tax-refunded-1010-for-amazon-uk/
The *only* way we will get the vendors to start supplying naked computers or ones pre-installed with an OS of *your* choice is to constantly campaign for the refund of the Windows Tax.
I downgraded to the latest F13 kernel (was using an older rawhide kernel) and things are happy again.
As for battery life, it started around 8 hours and is now between 6.5 and 7 with wifi active at a "low" brightness (it ranges from "my T61 at 50%" to "DS Lite" in brightness after a BIOS upgrade).
As for the Microsoft Tax, mine was a prize so there's not much I could do.
You didn't read my post did you? :-)
Mine was also a prize. So I had the refund sent back to the company which sponsored it and they donated it to a green cause and got some PR out of it too!
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2009/07/29/amazons-windows-refund-helps-the-earth/
Cheers
My problem is that I'm not sure where it came from. I think it came from ThinkGeek (there were other goodies there by them). I'll see what we can do (was won as a team).
Hi! Thank you for your review! I have found your post by putting "asus 1001 ha fedora" in the googlesearch. I have purchased mine 1001 also through amazon, on December; it differs from your model, though (I have only 3-cell battery etc.) I guess you are asking yourself why I am writing this to you :) Today I have installed Fedora 12 and got my internet working through ndiswrapper (I don't have ethernet, so I had to download .rpms to flash via my Windows partition.) Since the first day of the purchase I have used Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the older version, I have tried also Moblin and FreeBSD (as an ex-BSD user I had to see), but Fedora is just the thing for a netbook. I am so pleased to know that there is another person using Fedora with (almost) the same netbook :)
Regards,
Julie.
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