Re: [dwm] Asustek EEE PC 1000 Atom 1GB 40G SSD Linux Black

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 10:28:28AM +0100, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
> What do people think about such an EEE PC as low budget option to run
> dwm on? Any experiences already if the screen is big enough for daily
> work?

At work, I have 2 19" 1280x1024 LCDs running (unfortunately) Windows XP.
However, my primary machine at home for email, web browsing, development,
and anything else I do is a Thinkpad 600E with 14" 1024x768 screen. So,
only slightly more vertical space than the 1024x600 EEE PC.

I run dwm nearly exclusively in Monocle mode.

dwm at a lower resolution is not a problem, although the tiling modes are
mostly worthless without hstack/bstack patches. A potential problem with
lower resolution are flash-based websites that are hard-coded to expect
1024x768 at a minimum. Without the ability to scroll vertically, some
sites/applications become unusable.

From a performance standpoint, it really depends what you're doing on the
machine. My 600E has a P3-750 and 512mb RAM. I can compile dwm in a few
seconds. A recent kernel compile (2.6.23) took about 2.5 - 3 hours.

Most of what I do is in a terminal running screen. mutt, elinks, ncmpc,
snownews, vim, etc. I use those apps because they're what I prefer. The
fact that they are not resource hogs (compared to their GUI equivalents) is
simply a bonus.

Abiword, Gnumeric, even OO.org occasionally, are all very usable.

My main concern about something like the EEE PC is the performance cost of
using cheap MLC SSD drives. Read speed is great, but writes can be
significantly slower... particularly if you're exceeding the system RAM and
needing to page to disk.

In Monocle mode, with a full-screen terminal window and terminus 12, I can
get 62 lines on screen (status bar showing). Going to a 600 pixel high
screen would sacrifice about 13 or 14 lines of text. 48+ lines is still
double what we all used back before framebuffer drivers were available at a
console. :-)

If you're clear about your needs, and reasonable about your expections, I
think a UMPC could be a very useful and enjoyable laptop replacement.

Regards,
Bob

P.S. Long time lurker, first time poster - as they say.
Received on Sat Sep 06 2008 - 04:28:29 UTC