Hello Dave I am a linux professional who might need a bit more time on Solaris..
I have an eeePC and love it to bits. The Stock Xandros distro is very good for someone who just wants to 'do stuff' It's well put together and really integrates networking and wireless, even the support for 3G dongles is well integrated and dead easy to configure. Build quality is good. My Wife took an instant shine to it, so much so that she bought her own one! This is saying quite a lot because She has completely avoided computers up until now. However the stock distro, to me felt very limiting, you can configure it to have a normal menu and add standard debian repositories etc. Once you have done that it's a bit more usable. I am, however not a debian fan so I moved the eeePc's default distribution to a 4G flash card ( for dual boot) and installed Redhat Fedora8 on the internal hard disk with the xfce desktop (it's much lighter than KDE or Gnome). with a little bit of tweaking this works flawlessly, I will shortly be installing Fedora 9 which ships with eeePC support it's fast enough to do pretty much anything I throw at it, the keyboard is acceptable for it's size. For a systems admin having a small portable machine that can do things like openVPN and SSH is fantastic About the only limitation is the screen size, some X apps will not resize small enough to fit on the screen. Quite often this seems to be simply down to programmers who think no one would ever want to resize that small even though the program has plenty of 'room' left to shrink. This seems to be a particular problem with some of the ham radio apps. A work around is that the oversize programs can be dragged around a larger virtual desktop by holding ALT then dragging with the mouse. It's not that big a deal but the 901 (with the bigger screen and larger HD ) is on my want list once they are shipping in quantity The state of linux ham radio software is still a bit disappointing in some areas but it is improving. The killer app for me would be a full featured, award tracking logging program that used a mySQL database back end. it would be even neater if there was an agreed, extensible SQL database format that multiple logging packages could share. Handing a log with nearly 20,000 QSO's in it is most efficiently done by a database app not a flat file format based app. This would also allow for software to share the logging data between multiple programs. For example Contest logger could the same database as the normal logger, the integrated logger in the digimodes program(s), the VHF Grid square tracking logger and the ADIF import/export program. For this to occur there needs to be a lot more dialogue and ideas sharing between developers of open source ham radio software. DJ1YFK has written a nice simple logger that ticks some of my boxes, as well as some other nifty programs http://fkurz.net/ham/ Those interested in Linux ham radio software development might also be interested in the IRC channel dedicated to this on freenode http://freenode.net/ #hamradio and for fedora users there is #fedora-hams where work is underway to include much more ham radio software support to the next fedora distribution. 73 Brendan EI6IZ RHCE #805008029731335 On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 01:35 +0100, David Ferrington, M0XDF wrote: > Thanks > I'd like to avoid XP, mostly because I'm a Unix professional who needs > a bit more time on Linux (I'm mostly Solaris) > > I've seen a colleagues Eee PC 701 and wondered, but I'd like to spend > less, so was thinking of the 4G (701) > > any thought's most welcome > 73 de M0XDF, K3 #174 -- Don‘t complain. Nobody will understand. Or care. And certainly don‘t try to fix the situation yourself. It‘s dangerous. Leave it to a highly untrained, unqualified, expendable professional. _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
