So I could find no Canterbury local meatspace dealer who had one of these gadgets so I ordered it from Expert Infotech in Auckland. http://www.einfo.co.nz/
$628 bought me - 1Gb ram, 20Gm flash drive, wireless, bluetooth, ethernet, usb* 3 I ordered it Monday, it arrived in Chch Thursday. Alas, I was _not_ happy with the service from NZCouriers. Despite all the happy web parcel tracking magic they provide... (like tracert in slow motion) you really don't want to find an expensive cardboard parcel abandoned in the rain at your front door! Nor, when you open the parcel do you want to find somebody has dropped it with considerable force. Fortunately Asus packed the thing well enough that it looks as if it survived... although I haven't been able to get the wireless working yet. It runs Xandros linux, which seems to be a heavily kludged Debian distro that someone has tried very very hard to make look like a very easy to use windowsy type thing for very dumb users. Those who know me will understand how I felt, and get a good laugh at my expense, when I found there is no (visible) way of reaching a command line. (The answer is ctrl-alt-t) Alas, it doesn't come with synaptic installed. (Hey, apt-get works) It seems to have a 4Gb etx2 root partition and a 16 Gb ext3 "other" partition and no swap. Admittedly, until the moment I found apt-get, I was severely (and still am slightly) tempted to wipe the current distro and install Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Now if I can just install sshd so I can administer the thing from my desktop... I'll tell you more as I find out more about the thing. John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : [email protected] New Zealand
