ASUS Eee PC X101 runs Linux, costs only $200 (video) | Hacker News Reader

ASUS Eee PC X101 runs Linux, costs only $200 (video)

engadget.com

57 pointsmoe41 comments

I have some design criticisms.

To start with, look at the edge-on photo comparing the X101 to the Macbook Air.

Now, in the graphics editor of your choice, re-colour that battery step at the back of the X101 in the same colour as the machine itself, rather than (nearly invisible in photos) black.

Suddenly, it's twice as thick! Who'd have guessed? Yes, this machine looks like a Macbook Air competitor, but only because they used a user-removable battery, which means a big hunk'o'plastic sticking out of the underside.

Next, look at the photos of the keyboard layout.

In particular, look at the location and width of the right shift key.

This is a particular beef of mine with Asus -- and most other far eastern vendors: the right shift is the size of a regular letter key and is positioned to the left of the up-arrow. If you're an English-speaking touch-typist you will end up hitting up-arrow half the time when you mean to type a capital letter from the left side of the QWERTY block. (I suspect Chinese, Korean, and Japanese keyboard mappings ignore the right shift key, hence it tends to be deprecated by designers who don't do their usability testing on American or European users.)

Upshot: it looks gorgeous (especially for $200!) at first glance, but I'm pretty sure it would drive me insane within half an hour if I had to actually do any typing on it. Regardless of operating system.

keyboard layout

I'm in the market for a netbook right now and have the same concerns.

Currently I'm torn between the Asus X101 and the Lenovo S100 (both announced to launch this month). The Lenovo comes with an 98%-size keyboard that looks really promising on the photos: http://ces.cnet.com/2300-32488_1-10006040-2.html

The Lenovo keyboard layout looks kosher for touch-typists. If I was in the market for a netbook I'd jump in that direction.

(The right-shift-FAIL seems to be a bad habit of Asus and a few other Chinese/Taiwanese vendors; I suspect Lenovo still have some input from IBM.)

One thing that bothers me about IBM/Lenovo is that the Fn key is where control should be.

I have an Eee PC with the same style of keyboard as the X101 and I can't really think of anything negative about it. It's the best laptop keyboard I've ever used and I've reached speeds up to 130 wpm on it.

A friend of mine recently got a lenovo thinkpad and it had a BIOS flag to allow swapping of the Fn and control key, sadly the physical keys are different size so you can't swap them to match the new function but at least it's an option

Sad day for typists when the Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Insert/Delete block getting blown up all over is considered kosher.

Sadly that has happened years ago and I don't have much hope for them to make a comeback. I'm in fact worried about the day when apple stops selling their full-size desktop keyboards in favor to the crippled laptop-version.

When you look at the whitespace (well, red-space) on the right side of the Lenovo then there is plenty room to fit a full-size Home/End/Pgup/Pgdn block.

But it would look a little odd. And I suppose Soccer-mom doesn't buy laptops that look odd for sake of fitting keys that she doesn't use. Soccer-moms apparently prefer glitter over usable keyboards...

I also just noticed that laptop doesn't have a dedicated F12 key, it's Fn-F11. Tempora, mores, etc.

Have you considered the Thinkpad x120e? The keyboard, performance, and battery life are all excellent. It's a bit more expensive than what you're looking at, though.

I'm with you on that black battery thing. We all know that Apple is a bit dishonest when they show their Macbook Air from the front and it looks as thin as cardboard (optical illusion), but when you look at a Macbook Air from the side it's actually kinda slim in reality.

Now, that X101 with the red-black coloring looks slim if you trust the optical illusion, but if you look closely it's nowhere close to the Macbook Air.

I have an ASUS (my second in the EEE line) with exactly the same keyboard. You get used to it, or at least I did. I actually think the chicklet-style keyboards on recent EEEs are among the best laptop keyboards I've used. A much bigger problem for me is accidently hitting the touchpad while typing. Depending on your OS there is usually a way to disable the touchpad while typing.

On the thickness thing, do they advertise this as being as thin as the Macbook Air? I took that picture more along the lines of "here is the X101 compared to a laptop you're probably familiar with". The optical illusion created by the black plastic is a little sneaky though.

Is there a site with reliable specs for this box? Googling around I've seen different numbers (e.g, a 16GB SSD vs. a 64GB SSD). What's the battery life? That's what appeals to me most about the EEEs.

what os are you using? this was a problem for me before i set up hot keys to toggle touchpad on and off.

Suddenly, it's twice as thick! Who'd have guessed? Yes, this machine looks like a Macbook Air competitor, but only because they used a user-removable battery, which means a big hunk'o'plastic sticking out of the underside.

it's not a macbook air competitor, it's a $200 netbook with an atom processor. it just happens to have a slim profile that may cause some people to compare it to the macbook air.

asus' macbook air competitor is their ux21: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/30/asus-outs-ux21-ultrathin-...

which means a big hunk'o'plastic sticking out of the underside.

I have an old Acer Aspire One with a similar battery configuration. Turns out it's actually very useful at positioning the keyboard at a much more comfortable typing angle. I end up propping up the back end of my MBP with my phone half the time so I can type comfortably.

My first home computer in the 1990s was well over $6k in current inflation adjusted USD and had a 12 mhz CPU with a 800x600 (or lower, can't remember) 14" CRT screen, a dot matrix printer and two games.

At $200 this computer is coming in at couple of days or a maybe one week worth of post-tax salary at some of the lowest wages in many first world countries[1]. And it has a 1.5gighz processor and access to an advanced unix operating system and open source (rather than the limiting DOS for example).

[1] envelope calculations: it seems it takes under two days after-tax with 19.5k pound UK salary (the average for someone with one year of work experience). Edit: I should add that most of a low income salary usually goes on rent, food and transport so the disposable income calculation to reach $200 is different/takes longer. Nevertheless, an amazing reduction in price, 1/30th, and increase in processing power, 100x + (mhz for mhz..).

Remember that ASUS shipped their first EeePCs with Linux pre-installed. They soon ended up selling most with Windows, though, after Microsoft made XP available for them and cheap. They didn't put a lot of commitment into Linux, using idiosyncratic Xandros as their distro and rarely providing any updates. Now they seem to be doing this again, with MeeGo. I'm curious whether they will manage to have the computer boot up without an ugly DOS-style cursor blinking, and also in Macbook-quality suspend-to-ram.

The Linux distro they used on the original ones was pretty bad. Mine runs Ubuntu now, and I still use it though it is slow, and could do with an upgrade...

I'm curious whether they will manage to have the computer boot up without an ugly DOS-style cursor blinking, and also in Macbook-quality suspend-to-ram.

I'm pretty sure that all the "normal person" Linux distros have a splash screen until X starts these days. Also, haven't noticed any problems with suspend to RAM on any machines these days: hardware vendors have largely gotten ACPI right at this point. (If you want true OS X style suspend, use s2both instead s2ram.)

People always say this, and on my recent Thinkpad it works out of the box - but not every time. I can't completely rely on it. It's a world of difference to my friend's Macbook Air. To get these things right (polish), you have to spend some time working on this rather than rushing hardware out of the door. Non-Apple hardware vendors and particularly those who ship Linux aren't very good at this, nor at fixing things after releasing the notebook.

My Thinkpad X220 works every time.

I know quite a few Windows 7 laptops that don't get hibernation quite reliable, either. I guess that could mean that hibernation is simply very hard to do if you don't know the exact hardware.

That they were able to force Microsoft's hand like that says a lot about the desirability of a Linux notepad at that end of the market.

Yes,

The problem is that in a niche market that threatens to make inroads, MS has an incentive to lower their price to zero or even negative to prevent a competitor from entering the field (and Linux actually never costs zero since no one gives away reasonable quality Linux support and configuration).

The poor sales of the Linux EeePCs really only applied in the US: EU sales were 50/50 with no particular returns bias between the two if my memory of Asus' statements at the time is correct. Perhaps there was some difference in the marketing / choice of sales channels between the US and EU that led to the difference?

Here is what amazes me about this: an iPod touch costs ~$230, and it is considered by some to be cheap for what you are getting (compare it to small Android tablets).

This is a whole laptop for less than that price.

Also, I don't think that comparing it to the MacBook Air makes much sense - this is not the laptop designed to be the thinnest, it is designed to be the cheapest.

I guess they want to market it as if it were competing with the Air, though.

But that is comparing Apples to Oranges, if you ask me. Comparing a tiny SSD (SDCARD?) and a wimpy Atom and a plasticky case and a sexy price to a full-fledged SSD, a Core2Duo (i3 soon?), superb build quality and a hefty price tag? Doesn't make sense. Apple is marketing for thin, elegant, expensive. Asus should be marketing for cheap, tiny, gets-the-job-done.

I think they should be marketing for "Go everywhere laptop".

Would you take your MBA to the beach? Hiking? Partying?

I don't. Too concerned about my $1000-device getting sandy, dropped, stolen or having drinks spilled over it.

$200-device? No-brainer. Could buy a new one every year and still be cheaper than the expected lifetime of a MBA.

The iPod also fits in your pocket, exists in a much richer ecosystem and its specs come dangerously close to being the same. $30 for that level of miniaturization is a steal.

I really want to love the MeeGo Netbook UX and ran it for a month on my Lenovo s10-3t but can't get over its filing-cabinet UI; I can't just get to an application outside of the 6 or so on the quick launch box. You have to click on a tab, then play category bingo to figure out or try to remember which category panel to expand and find it in--and only one can be expanded at a time.

Also, the glittery nonsense on the paint job is sort of horrible. I hate it on my Lenovo netbook too; This is supposed to be a Netbook, not a Twilight character.

I actually worked with a MeeGo netbook for some time. In reality you launch apps with Alt-F2 and first couple of chars of app name, or just use the search box. Fast and efficient.

While I really agree with you on the convenience of the run-prompt (or dmenu-style launchers, which I use on my Arch+Xmonad machine), try to tell a regular user to start a program this way. He/she will stare at you in disbelief and then go back to clicking through menus. If you want MeeGo to sell/gain market share (and I'd group MeeGo together with Ubuntu/Mint-like Linux distros, in other words, consumer/enduser-oriented), you need a consistent and simple GUI (which doesn't mean that the capabilities for advanced users have to be dumbed down, though).

In MeeGo netbook the search box is at least visible in the Apps tab. This makes it a bit more approachable

I agree that its fast and efficient to use the search box, but its something I rarely see people doing outside circles of sysadmins and developers.

The existing UI can easily be saved by just knocking out the expandable panels completely and just putting all the apps on one panel delineated by category name.

The windows 7 version costs $310.

Coming out in July.

Specs: "1.33GHz, single-core Atom N435, a six-cell battery, and a small SSD (probably of the 16GB variety)"

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/27/slim-asus-eee-pc-x101-to-...

Why they just don't make a 200 dollar tablet out of it? Probably would be a bit thicker than what's now on the market, but with such a price tag? People wouldn't mind.

I don't think you can get a 10" touchscreen and 10 hour battery at that price point. As soon as they make this a tablet, it's no longer $200 or if it is, the battery will last 30 minutes and the screen will be resistive.

Asus already makes a Tegra2 Android tablet that's around $400. Knowing Asus, that's probably on the low end of what such a tablet can cost without sacrificing important features like battery life and the quality of the touchscreen. A netbook can be quite a bit heavier than a tablet and still be accepted by users, and its input devices cost a lot less.

Give me a Chromebook at that pricepoint an I'm in!

Is it possible to install Chrome OS on this?

As far as I know it's not. I would also love to install Chrome OS on an old Windows XP laptopn of mine which currently needs like 5 minutes to boot but that seems not possible as well.

Nice, I've been missing this for a while to renew my family's netbooks.

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