As some of you may have noticed, I usually carry around a tiny little black laptop when I’m at Beer and Blog or at a coffee shop. Since people ask about it so much, I decided to write a few blog posts about it with this being the first.
What is it? Its an EeePC 1000 from ASUS (the same guys that make motherboards). Its a new type of laptop that is generally referred to as a netbook mainly because it lacks some of the features that a normal laptop has such as a cdrom, being heavy, a multi-core power sucking CPU, and a huge screen. Outside of that, its like any other laptop with a few other enhancements. In my case, this EeePC has these features which I love about it.
- Long battery life, claims one day computing (6+hrs)
- Solid State Drives (SSD) – no moving parts & better battery life!
- Multi-touch track pad
- Very usable keyboard (92% from a normal laptop)
- Lightweight (2lbs 15oz)
- Fast 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor
- 802.11n Wi-Fi and Blue-tooth
- 1.3MP web cam
I’ve used my trusty 15″ PowerBook for many years and I still use it, but its become more of a hassle to carry around with me. I’m a UNIX Admin, so I don’t need much on my laptop (xterm, Firefox, Thunderbird, and pidgin) to get work done and the EeePC was a perfect fit. The first models that ASUS releases for the EeePC didn’t appeal to me since they had a screen and keyboard that was too small for me to deal with. A good friend of mine (who also has the habit of being an enabler for me :P) purchased one for himself and kept raging about it. I was actually considering getting an upgrade for my PowerBook but didn’t want to pay $2K for a new MacBook, so instead I decided to get this EeePC for around $500 (its down to $430 now).
Asus gives you two options for Operating Systems on these laptops: Windows XP or Linux (Xandros). Since I’m a Gentoo developer, I decided to give it a try on this laptop. I encountered a few issues of course, but overall I have all the hardware working. The only annoying thing so far is the wireless driver not being included in the mainline kernel, but that’s going to change soon I hope. There is an open source driver but its a little finicky to deal with on networks using any form of security passwords. But it does work!
In the upcoming posts, I plan to write about the following:
- How I installed Gentoo on it
- Gentoo tweaks I use on it
- Window management
- Firefox tweaks (yes, you need them!)
- How netbooks are helping promote Linux to the masses
I love my EeePC and you should get one too! :)
In my first post on my new blog I mentioned that I decided to use Drupal for my main blog site. As you can probably notice by the footers on this page I’m no longer using Drupal and decided to go back to WordPress. I noticed several people at the last Corvallis Beer and Blog asked me about it. That made me think I should write a blog post about my journey, or at least the short version of it.
There were several reasons for this but it basically boiled down to using the right tool for the right job. Drupal is an amazing platform for managing and generating dynamic html content. Its plugin and theming system is one of the best out there. Unfortunately, I’m no Drupal guru (even though we host them at the OSL) and had several issues getting some things working like I wanted.
So why WordPress? Well, it seems like everyone in my region raves about it plus I tried the 2.7 version and saw how simple it was to administrate and setup. The ability to install plugins without ssh’ing into the machine was a key feature that I just loved. Here’s a few of the things that I really like about WP.
- Installing/Upgrading plugins easily
- Categories/Tags are easy to setup
- TinyMCE is installed and works flawlessly
- Comment spam is easier to handle
- The editing flow is less busy
- Found a theme that is simple, elegant, and easy to customize the header image
While I agree Drupal can essentially do all the things above, it requires more researching, googling, tweaking, and trail and error to get it right. I spent a week or two combing the interwebs trying to find a defining site or blog post that explained everything. I found several sites that had decent information, but it wasn’t explained in a manner that made sense to me. The whole concept of taxonomy is just strange to me and in WP its stupidly simple. To me Drupal is like the Gentoo of blog software. It’s great and awesome if you know how to tweak it and use it properly, but for a blogging n00b like me, its just too much hassle for me to do deal with. I think Drupal has some great documentation, its in no comparison to the simple ones like Gentoo has (which is a large part of why people can install it).
So what does Drupal need to do? A few simple things would have made my life easier:
- Create a page or site describing in detail how to setup similar features that modern blogs like WordPress have (categories, tags, etc)
- Implement module installation via Drupal
- Implement module upgrades via Drupal
- Create a Blog centric theme similar to K2
- Make it easier for people to use Drupal but keeping it simple for normal bloggers
I may go back to Drupal someday but I need to understand it more. I really think Drupal is an awesome project and its ability is far superior than any other CMS out there. But for a blog its just a bit too hardcore for the average blogger. Hopefully that will change in a few years.
