Ben Hughes

It’s true - I can’t help myself. Once I noticed that the headphone-out on my 900HA was much cleaner than I had expected, I decided I needed to do some testing. Nothing too serious, as I have no plans to actually use an eeepc as a music source, but enough to satisfy my curiosity.

The setup was as usual: both sources connected to my DIY switch box, then into the PA2V2 amp and the MS Pros. I level matched the sources by ear using a sine wave, ending up with the ipod on full volume  and the 900HA 4 steps below full volume (jack set to line out mode). The 900HA was booted into Windows, as the audio seems to be better quality. Both sources were playing WAV files.

The A/B testing was done fairly subjectively, without the usual rigour. Rather than having a certain number of guesses and recording the results, I just listened to a dozen tracks or so, switching back and forth, checking my guess, then re-randomising the input selection.

Suprisingly both were quite similar in sound, and it wasn’t until near the end of the listening session that I identified the different sound signatures. The ipod was noticably smoother, especially in the mids, whereas the  900HA had a more live/harsh sound. By the end of the session I could pick the source around 8/10 times.

Despite being still very impressed with 900HA, the ipod subjectively has a much nicer sound. But it’s impressive that a netbook that cost only slightly more than the ipod is so close sonically. Especially when every full-size laptop I’ve heard has utterly terrible audio.

As an aside, synching the tracks between sources was a bit of a challenge, as both had a slightly different delay from button-press to track start. I eventually got the swing of it, although never got it perfect. It’s much easier to test amps than sources.

As a follow-up to my last post on installing Ubuntu on an eeePC 900HA I thouguht I’d do a quick write-up on eeebuntu, which as you  can tell from the name is a Ubuntu derivative customised for the eeePC. The current version is based on Intrepid Ibex, so you don’t miss out on any of the cool stuff.

The main benefits of eeebuntu over Ubuntu is that the majority of the hardware has support compiled into the kernel. That means no messing around looking for wifi drivers and having most of the function keys work without fiddling.

An added bonus is that Gnome has been minorly tweaked for the smaller resolution screen, it’s got a good-looking theme and they have bundled quite a few  useful apps, like CCSM, Pidgin, msttcorefonts and the OSX-dock-like AWN.

There was still some minor tweaking needed after the install, like changing the fonts to verdana (or one of the other true type options), enabling hibernation (via gconf-editor) and setting up Compiz to my liking.

Unfortunately the 900HA is not yet supported by the “eeebuntu config” utility, however the vast majority of things seem to work. One thing that doesn’t is CPU scaling. This seems to lead to around a 1/4 loss in battery time over XP (which uses the bundled ASUS power management app). For general browsing with the screen brightness turned down a fair way I can get around 3 hours under eeebuntu and at least 4 under XP.

These days I very rarely boot into Windows, unless the extra hour battery life is vital. One thing to keep an eye on is Firefox CPU usage - for certain sites (and with some plugins) CPU usage went up to 100%, which is a sure fire way to kill battery life.

Overall I’m very pleased with eeebuntu - it’s slick, works out of the box, and introduced me to some cool things like AWN. Highly recommneded for anyone running an eeepc.

Now that I’ve got a new toy of course I have to fiddle around with it a bit, and the best way is to see how various OSes run. On my list I have Ubuntu, Windows 7, and perhaps OSX. First up will be Ubuntu, because 1) it should be easy enough and 2) I can download the ISOs without chewing through my quota.

One of the fiddly things about OS installs on netbooks is of course that they don’t have optical drives, so you can either buy one, or install from a USB drive. Most of the guides, for all 3 OSes, have a fairly fiddly method for creating a bootable USB drive that contains the installation media. The Ubuntu live CD comes with a utility to do this, but it requires booting from the live CD. Which, of course, requires either having an optical drive, or another PC with one.

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I’ve been eyeing off netbooks since the original 7 inch eeePC was released, but until now none of them really fitted my needs. Those needs are, roughly:

• good battery life (4hrs+)
• at least 1GB RAM
• decent enough processor (but nothing spectacular)
• good sized hard drive (80Gb+)
• atleast 1024×600 resolution
• very small form factor (around the 9″ mark)
• under AU$600

That’s quite a list. Up until recently the HP mininote came in closest, but was too big and too expensive. However with the netbook market expanding there are some models now available that come very close.

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