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So, here are the steps I took to turn a stock Eee into the perfect machine for writing on the move.

1. Enable Advanced Desktop Mode, because Easy Mode is just silly.
2. Add extra repositories, from which to download applications not provided by Asus.
3. Install SSH server, so you can connect your Eee from other computers: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
4. Install Subversion, to keep all your files in sync: sudo apt-get install subversion (setting up a Subversion repository is left as an exercise for the reader).
5. Install AbiWord, because OpenOffice is too slow on the Eee: sudo apt-get install abiword.
6. Install VLC, for playing telly programmes on the train when you can’t be arsed working: sudo apt-get install vlc
7. Tweak Firefox to make it more Eee-friendly:
   1. Install the MiniFox theme.
   2. Install the Fullerscreen add-on.
   3. Install the Google Browser Sync add-on, to keep your bookmarks, passwords and history synchronised with your main computer (optional, but well handy).
8. Remember to keep all your stuff on a removable SDHC card, not on the Eee’s internal memory card.

That’s it. The whole procedure takes under ten minutes, most of which is spent waiting for the list of repositories to update and the 15MB AbiWord to download.

I’ve been running the Eee like this for ten days now, and haven’t missed any of the gizmos I’d installed over the last few months. More importantly, the Eee is now as fast as crikey, and I haven’t had a single application crash on me yet.

Just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost the will to tinker, I feel moved to point out that I wrote the above while waiting for a Puppy Linux CD to burn.

For transferring files, I’ve tried SMB, NFS and WebDAV, which have all worked, pretty much, but were all also fiddly to set up, unstable and generally bloody annoying. (Interestingly, most of the problems have been on the Mac side.)

Today, I happened upon ExpanDrive, a new application for OS X that installs, and provides a simple setup interface, for MacFUSE and SSHFS. In plain English, that means I can mount the Eee PC - and any other computers on my network - just like an external disk drive, SMB or AFP, so that it is completely integrated into the Finder.

Setup is easy.

If you haven’t already, install openssh-server on the Eee PC:

1. Install it: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
2. Then start it up: sudo /etc/init.d/ssh
3. Then make it start up whenever you switch on your Eee PC by opening /etc/fastservices in a text editor - eg. sudo nano /etc/fastservices - and adding a line that says ssh.

Then, back on the Mac, install and launch ExpanDrive, and fill in your server name, username and password. For some reason, your username for SSH purposes is ‘user’, not your actual username, though your password is the same one as usual (I have no idea why, and it took me bloody ages to guess that it is when I first started using SSH to log in to the Eee PC).

That’s it. As far as your Mac is concerned, your Eee PC is now part of the filesystem, so you can open and edit files on it, move stuff between the computers, even play MP3s stored on the Eee on your Mac. Very nice.

As well as the simple setup - especially when compared to getting MacFUSE and SSHFS set up using more manual means, which is a right sodding chore - ExpanDrive scores points for speed and stability. In terms of speed, I really can’t tell the difference between working on a file stored locally and one on the Eee, which wasn’t the case when using other protocols. And ExpanDrive is rock solid, much better than the Finder when it comes to dealing with stuff over a network: you can put your Mac to sleep, or disconnect from the network, without having to fear the spinning beach ball of doom. ExpanDrive will just silently reconnect when you wake up the computer or rejoin your network. Very clever.

When it comes to keeping stuff in sync, I’ve taken a slightly peculiar route: Subversion.

This is a very clever synchronisation thingy, usually used by groups of people who write code, so that they can all make changes to files they’re all working on without buggering everything up. It’s probably overkill for one person writing reviews for the paper, but I’ve really taken to it.

Subversion works by keeping all your files on a server in a “repository”¹. You can then “checkout” the files, work on them, and “commit” your changes, which updates the copies on the server. It doesn’t matter what computer you’re on when you do the checking out/editing/committing routine, as long as Subversion is installed, which it is by default on Macs running Leopard. To get it on the Eee, you just do the usual sudo apt-get install subversion thing. And, because your files are living online too, you can access them through a web browser on any old machine you happen to be sitting in front of.

This is, obviously, fabulously convenient, and for a basic user like myself, there’s only a handful of commands to remember. On the Mac side, though, after the first time you import your files into your repository and check them back out, you don’t even need to open a Terminal, let alone remember any commands, thanks to three of my fave applications, Path Finder, TextMate and Quicksilver², all of which have Subversion support built in.

So, it’s taken a while, but thanks to the release of ExpanDrive, and the (er, relative) ease of use of Subversion, I have everything set up to easily share and sync files between my Eee PC and Macs over the network.

The days of walking around the flat carrying an SDHC card like some primitive data-ape are over!

Now, I really must start reading up on rsync and Unison…

1. Donny very kindly made me a repository on his server, but I only saw his email after I’d set up my own. Cheers Don!↩

2. Textmate and Path Finder both cost money, Quicksilver is open source. Free alternatives to using Path Finder’s Subversion support include SvnX, SCPlugin and this collection of AppleScripts ↩

I think this post sets a new record for TLAs and other acronyms on Submit Response!

Using The Eee PC

• Writing on the Eee PC is do-able, but impractical when it comes to longer pieces. When writing anything over a few hundred words, I tend to have two text files open and visible on screen, one full of notes, half-formed paragraphs jotted down as they pop into my head and a rough outline, the other for the actual business of writing the piece. This is impossible on the Eee PC’s little screen, and I found it very hard to adapt to flitting between two fullscreen documents, rather than having both available for reading and writing simultaneously. When it comes to the final pass, which for me tends to involve a fair bit of cutting, pasting and rewriting of the first draft, the Eee PC’s small display is even more bothersome: I had no idea how important it is for me to be able to read large chunks of text in their entirety on screen, but it turns out that all the to and fro of scrolling required, even when using AbiWord in fullscreen mode with a display font set at the limits of legibility, really gets in the way of finishing a piece of work.

• That said, it’s amazing how quickly one can adapt to writing on the Eee PC: I now type almost as quickly on the dinky keyboard as I do on my MacBook Pro, though with many more errors, and have absorbed a huge number of keyboard commands. This is a problem as much as a positive, though - every time I switch between the Mac and the Eee PC I spend five minutes or so adrift, stumbling over the Command and Control keys, and some things are so ingrained (triggering Textexpander macros or launching Quicksilver for example) that I suspect my brain will never override my muscle memory.

• Web browsing is just fine. The overwhelming majority of sites I visit render perfectly on the dinky display, and the scrolling side of the trackpad makes navigating pages a cinch. I have noticed one big difference in my browsing habits, though. On the Eee PC, if I come across a page of interest, I’ll print it to a PDF file for later reading, rather than leave the tab open. On the Mac, I would routinely have 20 or more tabs open, something the underpowered Eee just can’t handle, but I’ve now ported the habit over: it’s better to have an easily searchable folder of PDF print-outs than grub around for that tab I opened last Tuesday. Flash-heavy sites, and too many open tabs bearing YouTube videos will cause Firefox to choke on the Eee PC, but since I avoid the former, and could do with watching less of the latter, this hasn’t proved to be a problem.

• Managing images is tricky. I had thought that the Eee PC would be ideal as a photographer’s companion, so to speak, but the small screen makes even light editing - croppping, resizing, etc. - a chore, and the tendency of Firefox to have a fit when uploading more than a couple of full-size images to Flickr is frustrating. Still, for dumping images off your camera’s SD card for later processing or quick uploading, the Eee PC is a lot easier to lug around than your average laptop (it fits in the front pocket of my camera bag, with room to spare).

• Everything else is on the web. As I mentioned before, using the Eee PC often feels like using a client to Google’s various services (or other web services and hosted applications, like Backpack and its sister apps). This feels like the realisation of a long-predicted trend: the iPhone, the Eee PC, the Newton and the better UMPC type things really are a new class of networked portable device, I think, capable of changing the way we use computers and the web. If only the network was ubiquitous, and if only I were willing to trust all my data to third parties.

Hardware

• Wireless networking is solid, but not perfect. When out and about, the Eee PC picks up more available networks than my MacBook Pro, but sometimes has trouble connecting and maintaining connections, especially to those with a weak signal. (After an annoying afternoon in windswept Leeds trying to get online, getting the Eee PC to dial up via my Nokia N95, or even investing in one of those pay-as-you-go USB 3G modem thingys has become a priority.)

• Storage is a big problem. There’s just no room on the Eee PC for many media files, unless you want to muck about removing applications and files the Eee would rather you left alone. The answer? Get a for a 16GB SD card for Christmas!

• Battery life is nothing to be sniffed at, especially if you turn off WiFi and dim the backlight as much as you can stand. I got the train from Liverpool to Glasgow on Monday, and watched two and a half hours of downloaded telly, listened to a bunch of Radio 4 stuff gleaned from Speechification, and read a week’s worth of RSS feeds in Google Reader’s offline mode. The Eee PC had enough juice left for me to check my mail and footle about on the web for half an hour when I got home.

The operating system

• Linux is ugly, and hard to use. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with the inconsistencies of the user interface. On a Mac, I know where certain menu items will be found, and can count on standard command key combos doing what I expect, regardless of the application I’m using. Under Xandros, there are no such certainties, and you have to learn a distinct set of commands, and a new menu layout for pretty much every application you run. Even something as basic as quitting an app is completely inconsistent across applications - Control + Q will work a lot of the time, admittedly, but you can’t count on it. Talking of which, who thought it was a good idea to have applications up and quit when you close a window? That’s just incredibly stupid behaviour (if you’ve been using Macs exclusively for more than a decade). I’ve even found myself abandoning the GUI of some applications in favour of the command line, which is fine by me, but pretty bloody ridiculous.

• Linux also has its strengths, of course! Package management is just the absolute business, a brilliant model for installing, updating and uninstalling applications. Updating all my applications on the Mac to the latest version would take a good deal of Googling, downloading, deleting and installing. Typing apt-get upgrade is a cinch in comparison.

• The twin OS that ships with the Eee PC is a good thing. Kate, James and I got my Dad an Eee PC for Christmas: he’s sticking with the default Easy Mode interface and, so far, the default applications. Admittedly, he’s a geeky pensioner, sorry Silver Surfer — Flickr account, nascent weblog and all — but I’d guess that someone with next to no computing experience would be comfortable with it. In other words, Asus have made a desktop Linux distro that anyone can use out of the box, without even having to look at a terminal window. This does not match my experience with other Linux distros, and that’s putting it mildly. (Of course, they have the ‘Apple advantage’ here, matching their hardware with a bespoke OS.)

So, is it any good?

Yup! In the end, the Eee PC has far exceeded my expectations. Sure, it has its flaws - small screen and keyboard, the lack of polish and limitations of Xandros when compared to a ‘proper’ OS - but it’s a more than capable laptop, ultra-portable and eminently usable. It has completely replaced my MacBook Pro as a laptop, which is now installed in the office as a desktop replacement. At a push, I could even see someone with relatively modest computing needs making the Eee PC their main machine: add an external DVD drive, full-size keyboard and monitor, and it would more than meet the needs of anyone who uses a PC primarily to write, surf the web and manage mail.

See also: Eee PC Setup.