[PLUG] eee pc box

[Keith Lofstrom]

I bought an EEE PC *BOX* for my wife to use with (sigh) Windows XP
and Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.  It arrived a yesterday.  Before
I let it succumb to the nexus of evil, I booted it to an Ubuntu
Live CD on an external USB CDrom drive.  I am currently typing
this in through an xterm on running on that distro, through
ssh to my mail server.

The box is a repackaged version of the N270 Atom hardware that
makes up the EEE PC micronotebook.  It has a 160GB Seagate SATA
drive preinstalled with (gag again) WinXP home.  This was $330
from Amazon (shipped from Sparks NV) and arrived in 2.5 days
(ordered sunday night).  There are also versions of the same
B202 machine that come with something called LinuxEZOS and cost
$300.  

The box is about the size of a hardback novel, has a DVI port with
an add-on HD15 VGA adapter, 4 USB ports, a GBit Ethernet port, an
SD memory card port, some audio ports,  and a N wireless antenna
connector.  It is powered by an external AC adapter that draws 1W
standby, 14 watts running, probably lots more when doing disk access
while computing its little brains out.

It comes with a keyboard and mouse, and with a mounting plate to
attach it to the back of a flatscreen.

One surprising feature is that it has a miniature version of Linux
running from ROM:  Something called Expressgate powered by splashtop
from a place called DeviceVM.  From poweron, one can click icons on
the splash page to launch a stripped down web browser (resembling
firefox), games, and other web-based stuff.  So if you need a
browser 5 seconds from poweron, this is your baby.  The video 
configurations are limited.

What wireless card?  LSPCI shows:
   Network controller: RaLink Unknown device 0781 
for what I presume is the wireless adapter.  On the side of the
box are these device descriptions:
  AzureWave     FCC id
    AW-NE766    VQF-RT2700E
    AW-NE771    PPD-AR5B91

More to learn.  Linux compatability unknown.  If I use the wireless
at all, it will be as an access point - if possible.  If not, I will
turn it off.

What video display?   /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows an Intel 945GME Express
(or possibly a 943/940GML ) chipset.  The drivers from lsmod look like
the /might/ be i915 and intel_agp ... more investigation needed.  I have
a 1400x1050 LCD display that came up as 1024x768.  If I installed it
for real, I'm pretty sure I could match the LCD.  The Splashtop only
offers a choice of 7 resolutions, but the 1440x1050 choice looks OK.
WinXP connects to the LCD at 1400x1050.

Audio?  LSPCI says:
     Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family)  \
            High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)

I don't know how well that works, I haven't hooked it up.

So, I now reboot back to XP and prepare the speech recognition app.  
his will either not run on the perhaps-slow Atom, or it will only
run under native XP, or it might run under VMWare or VirtualBox. 
I don't think I can run Xen on the Atom, as it appears to lack the
virtualization instructions needed.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs