[nycbug-talk] Asus eeePC First Impressions

[george at ceetonetechnology.com]

Quoting Steven Kreuzer <skreuzer at exit2shell.com>:

> Greetings-
>
> I was wandering around the internet and I found this blog post about
> a persons first impressions on the eeePC, which we have talked about on
> this list a few times.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2lx4es
>

Interesting stuff. . .

> In a nutshell, the machine ships with some proprietary hardware, and to get
> the wireless to work you need to use ndiswrapper.
>

Eeek.

I had just heard it had atheros-based wireless, so in discussion after  
the last meeting, a few of us assumed ath on FBSD would work nicely. . .

> In addition, the acpi module that they shipped is a modified version of
> the asus_acpi kernel module from Linux 2.6.21.4. Asus apparently has not made
> the source available, which is a violation of the GPL


You gotta laugh at the GPL issue .. . I mean, end of the day, GPL ends  
up being the BSD license in practice.  With a distortion of the  
attribution clause.


>
> I was planning on picking up one of these, but now that the retail price is
> $399, combined with the fact that it doesn't look like you'll be able to
> get BSD fully working on it, I think I am going to pass
>

Yeah. . . you can note from earlier posts I was extremely enthusiastic . .

Then the delays happened, the price doubled, then the local vendor a  
number of us use got screwed by the distributors. . . Now I'm in limbo  
on it.

But with the driver issue (no ndis for me. . .) affecting at least the  
wireless if you want to run a BSD, then, err, I'll stay in limbo.

And this junk about ruining the warranty when opening to access the  
OPEN mini pci slot is just nuts.  Apparently, some later production  
runs of the current available model do not have the extra available  
slot.

It really would have worked out nicely if everything had vaguely  
resembled what they seemed.

g