Community Matters

Several people have asked me in the last few days about a comparison of the EeePC 900 and the EeePC 901. And the more I try to find an easy response, the more I realize just how complicated this has gotten.

Let’s start from the outside. The 900 and 901 models are very similar, they have the same screen, they both share the same keyboard (so they both have the keyboard issue that made me decide to switch from my EeePC 901 to an EeePC 1000 a few weeks ago), but there are a few differences. The 901 has the “new” body which connects the screen with metal hinges to the case, the 900 uses plastic hinges and is overall more similar to the 701. The 901 case feels a little sturdier and well built, but that may be a perception issue; it is 10% heavier than the 900. The two models are NOT exactly the same size, so be careful when looking at sleeves, etc.

Now let’s look at the internals. Admittedly there are way too many versions of the EeePC for anyone to keep track of, so I’ll try to get some structure in this. The main difference is of course the CPU – the EeePC 900 is based on an Intel Celeron M353 processor, the EeePC 901 is based on an Intel Atom N270 processor. The latter provides better performance and lower power consumption. On top of that Asus is shipping a larger battery with the 901, the net total of all this is about 2x the battery life compared to the 900.

Also, the 901 is the only one (in the 9xx series) that supports 802.11/n wireless, the other ones only support 802.11g.

There are a number of different storage options available. They seem to keep changing, but last time I checked you could get the both the 900 and 901 with 12GB SSD (that’s two separate devices, a 4GB system drive and an 8GB user data drive) and Windows or at the same price with 20GB SSD (4+16) and Linux. Lately the 900 also comes as a 16GB SSD model with just one built in SSD – this one with different prices for Windows and Linux versions. Be very careful with this model (often called EeePC 900 16G). I have seen a number of reports that the SSD in this model shows the same serious write performance degradation that I have observed on the 32GB secondary SSD in my EeePC 1000; I’m still trying to track down details, but if you have this as your system drive (where temp files and log files go) you may be in for a very sluggish user experience.

All of them come with 1GB of RAM, but that’s trivial to upgrade to 2GB (compare that to the Acer Aspire One where it is the ridiculously difficult to upgrade the memory). I highly recommend that upgrade as it really helps day-to-day performance when using these little computers.

Oh yes and then there’s the 900A (which brings the Atom processor to the 900 series body, but seems to make some other compromises, for example a lower resolution web cam) and the 904HA and 904HD (these ones have a 160GB HDD). I never owned either of them, so I can’t say too much about them.

I mentioned before in my article comparing the EeePC 901 with the 1000 that the keyboards of some Netbooks leave room for improvement. Today at IDF in Taipei I spent some time looking at the current crop of Netbooks and I realized that this is an endemic issue. Yes, there isn’t much space and therefore vendors have to make some compromises, but where these compromises impact day to day usability of the resulting computers, I think people are making a mistake.

The Asus EeePC 901 / 901 have the two-thirds sized ‘;‘ and ‘'‘ keys which make you hit ‘enter‘ when you want to hit ‘'‘. From what I could tell in the IDF showcase, the Netbooks from Founders, Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell share this unfortunate design. The only Netbooks that I found with regular keyboards were the Acer Aspire One and the EeePC 1000 / 1000H.

Even worse, the Netbooks from Dell, Sylvania and Lenovo had keys moved around to make their keyboard fit into the available space. Typing fast and blind on these systems will require a lot of getting used to – and jumping between these and standard keyboards is likely to be impossible. On several of these keyboard I had to stare long and hard to find keys like ‘~‘ or ‘\‘ on either side of the space bar (Sylvania) or ‘'‘ between the Windows Menu key and cursor left key (Dell) or the ‘]‘ not next to but below the ‘[‘, actually between the ‘'‘ key and enter.

I question the wisdom of these layouts…

One of my reasons for buying a higher end DSLR was the ability to do great low light photography, especially inside my house in the morning or evening – without the need for a flash. And one of my biggest disappointments since picking a Nikon D300 was the lack of fast (or large aperture) lenses from Nikon. In general, the Nikon branded lenses work much better with a Nikon body than after market lenses (there are lots of stories about problems with the Sigma 30mm f/1.4, for example). Yet if you want a lens that is faster than f/2.8 on your Nikon, the selection is really limited.

You can get the 50mm f/1.4D, the 50mm f/1.8D and the 35mm f/2.0D lens. And that’s it.

Compare that to more than a dozen Canon lenses from 24mm to 200mm with f/2.0 or better. Nikon, please wake up and give us better lenses!

The touchpads of the newer EeePCs (certainly the 900/900A/901/1000/1000H) all support some form of multitouch – not all the gestures we’ve seen on other pads, but the most important ones like scroll. The maker of the touchpad (Elantech) has posted newer Windows drivers for the touchpad a couple of months ago which according to several reports dramatically improves the smoothness of the touchpad’s response and add many more gestures (like pinch, browser navigation, etc.), but under Linux the support still isn’t really ideal (and no drivers from Elantech appear to be available). Especially the two-finger scroll that I am so used to from my Mac often doesn’t work. It scrolls a little, but then suddenly thinks that you are actually dragging one finger and switches to select mode – very frustrating.

Here’s an interesting little fact that I just ran across. It seems that the two flash drives (or SSDs) in my EeePC 1000 don’t have the same performance characteristics. I was trying to track down some surprising performance (and boot time) discrepancies on my EeePC 1000 and ran bonnie++ on different partitions in my system. Here are the results:

The smaller first sdd (/dev/sda under Linux) gets around 12MB/s write performance, whereas the larger second sdd (/dev/sdb) gets only around 3.5-4MB/s write performance. The read performance between both devices seems to be very similar.

Certainly something to be aware of.

More interestingly, while looking for further information on this issue I ran across the MyDigitalSSD’s 32GB SLC SSD for the EeePC which promises to significantly speed up both read and write performance on the second SSD. Using these benchmarks (unfortunately done under Windows, so not really comparable with the Linux results posted here) this SSD is 50% faster for reads and twice as fast for writes compared to the faster results that I got for the first SSD in my EeePC. Which should give me 6-8x the write performance for my larger SSD.

I’ll order one and report about the results.

Over the past couple of months this blog has moved twice. I think it was fairly seamless and I also think that the difference in responsiveness of the blog is fairly dramatic.

The first move was from my server at home to a VPS hosted with Datarealm. The rationale was that I finally wanted the webserver in a real data center – the data volume was reaching a point where it became noticeable for me when competing for bandwidth with it.

And then the second move this week from that VPS to a small dedicated server from Rackmounted – which actually is the same company! This one is a bit harder to explain. The VPS was normally fast enough to serve the blog (there was another VPS on the same server running amok for a few days that impacted performance, though). But the VPS has limited bandwidth and under load created a user experience on the blog that I found simply disappointing. So I figured I’d try a dedicated server.

I searched hard to find a hosting service that is at the same time cheap (affordable?) and reliable and provides good customer service. I searched the forums, I contacted some of the budget vendors. Scary stuff – response times of three days and more, sales people and technical support people who clearly know very little about the infrastructure and systems that they sell. And in general a lack of “service attitude” that was disheartening. Worstcase example was WSServer (I won’t provide a link here – they don’t deserve that). But several others weren’t much better.

Rackmounted on the other hand was a positive surprise. It’s a small company of about nine people that cover both the VPS and the dedicated server side of the the house. They respond to requests within hours (and sometimes minutes). They try to understand what you are trying to do. They don’t assume that you are stupid (this sounds silly, but let me tell you, it makes all the difference if the tech support person you talk to assumes that you know what you are doing and tries to work with you instead of trying to get rid of you).

The coolest thing was when I told them that I was looking at a dedicated server but wasn’t really able to justify the expense of the servers that they were offering. I asked if they had any specials, any old hardware that they could offer at a discount (and flat out told them the price range that I was looking for). And they got right back to me, made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse and set it up right away.

Really cool. Really surprising. And I’m happy to recommend them to anyone looking for affordable high quality hosting. Regardless of VPS or dedicated server.

The performance difference to the VPS is stunning. I’m very happy.

Linux Kongress is the oldest Linux event. How do I know? Well, in 1994, Linux Kongress in Heidelberg was the first ever conference on Linux. It was a really cool event that brought most of the key Linux developers of the time together – many of us met there in person for the first time! And since then, every year there has been a Linux Kongress (okay, that’s mildly cheating, last year’s event was only held “in spirit” as part of linux.conf.eu when the Kernel Summit came to Cambridge and the Linux Kongress organizers didn’t want to try to create an event competing wiht that).

So yesterday I had the honor to be the closing presenter at the 2008 edition of Linux Kongress, after having to miss attending a few of the last years. It was great to see so many familiar faces and my only regret was that based on some personal travel that I did earlier in the week I had to miss the first day of the event. Still, I had a great time and enjoyed the opportunity to talk about “Mobile Linux” and what I think it will take for the community to create a really compelling OS for the mobile internet user. I tried to explain where Linux falls short at present and what we are doing with the Moblin community to create the technologies to help to close that gap. Of course I took a chance to show off the amazing five second boot of an EeePC. But see for yourself. The talk should be up in the archive of Linux Pro Magazin’s Online Conference Streaming, soon.