[CS-FSLUG] The Experiment Begins

[Greg Slade]

Yesterday I laid my hands on an Everex Cloudbook, one of those small, 
inexpensive notebooks which have been making waves recently. (The Asus 
Eee is probably the most well-known.) I paid the equivalent of $344 US 
for it, which qualifies it for the "inexpensive" part of the experiment. 
(I could have gotten the model with 512 MB of RAM instead of 1 GB for 
$306, but I'm crazy, not stupid.)

The second part of the experiment is that it's powered by a Via 
Technologies C7 CPU, which draws something like 7 watts. Thus, at least 
potentially, I could get better life out of a given battery just because 
the power load is so small. Unfortunately, Everex chose to compensate by 
providing a tiny battery pack, so I'll probably end up getting about 
average battery life. However, I understand that it's possible to get a 
larger battery pack as an accessory. Now, Via's chips aren't at the 
forefront (nor even in sight of it) in terms of clock speed, but their 
power efficiency is amazing, so I wanted to test one under real life 
conditions.

The third part of the experiment is that it runs Gos, a Linux distro 
which I believe is based on Ubuntu. It might be possible to shoehorn 
Windoze into this thing, but part of what makes this thing so 
inexpensive is that you're not paying licensing fees to the evil empire. 
So, what I want to find out is whether Linux is ready for use by 
relatively experienced users who aren't Linux-savvy.

Greg

-- 
Greg Slade
Someone asked, "Another drink, Rene?"
Descartes said, "I think not..." and disappeared!