Summary
Last week my MacBook died of a premature death at age 2.
Out of necessity, I have been forced to borrow my wife's EeePC for a while and to use it as my main development platform. The unexpected thing is that it just works
perfectly.
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So far I have been using my wife's EeePC as my main platform for
four or five days. I have installed on it a lot of software I use for
writing my articles, including
emacs
latex
python2.5
python2.6
python3.0
numpy & matplotlib
sphinx
sqlite
postgresql
PLT scheme
Chicken scheme
Ikarus Scheme
Larceny Scheme
Ypsilon Scheme
and many any other things. I have compiled from source most stuff,
without any issue.
Right now I am preparing my talk for the Italian PyCon, when I
want to demonstrate, running live from the EeePC, matplotlib and
sphinx.
What can I say? The EeePC is not fast as the MacBook, but perfectly
usable anyway, and everything works. I did try to use my old Compaq
laptop first, but I could not use Ikarus on it, because its Athlon process
was too old and had no support for the SSE3 instructions required by
Ikarus. The EeePC instead works just fine and it actually much faster
than the old laptop (FWIW, compiling Larceny took less than half the
time) which costed something like 1500 Euros.
Now I am thinking if it makes sense for me to buy another "serious"
laptop and to spend something like 800 Euros or if I can just buy
another netbook for 300 Euros and be done with it.
The netbooks have really revolutioned the market and they are certainly
not good only for surfing the Internet.
I bought a Dell mini-9 a few months ago, thinking I was getting a "new toy". Mostly I figured on it being a way to easily carry Emacs org-mode with me wherever I go. Now I find that I spend more time on it than on my MacBook. I didn't expect that I'd be able to develop software on it as well as I can. I develop in Java and Python and a little C. I use Emacs, Maven and even some Eclipse on that little thing. Works fine.
At home I'm able to hook it up to a big screen when the built-in 1024x600 becomes too cramped. NXMachine also works well allowing me to access the netbook from a second machine with a larger display.
I currently use my Acer Aspire One (Running Fedora 10 rather than the preloaded Linpus) for all of my home development. I generally code in Python using vim on these projects, but have also developed small JEE apps in Eclipse on it!
The disadvantages I've found is that it won't do a great deal of heavy processing due to the limited threading supported by the processor, and the fact that IDE's are a bit of a pain to use, as you need to hide a lot of the toolbars and windows to get enough useable editor space. Not a problem in Vim of course!
> The netbooks have really revolutioned the market and > they are certainly not good only for surfing the > Internet.
I'd love get an inexpensive linux based laptop but I'm not interesting in something with a tiny screen and keyboard. I'm bad at typing as it is and my hands are fairly large. What I'd like is a lightweight laptop with a full sized keyboard and large screen somewhat like a Macbook Air but without the hefty price.
> I'm not > interesting in something with a tiny screen and keyboard.
Confirmed. I have a Lenovo netbook, and love the portability, but using it for development is a real pain (yes, I've tried it). Even web browsing can be ugly at times - most web sites don't display well on a 10" screen.
It's one of those problems with no "correct" solution. All you can do is looks for an acceptable set of compromises.
A laptop should be as small as possible with a screen and keyboard that are, at the same time, as large as possible. It should be (thermally) cool but pack the fastest CPU. It should be light (weight) with gigs of ram and teras of disk space and a stonking great battery (that is also tiny and light) and can power all of the above, all day. It should be (socially) cool and also be cheap.
As to eeePCs; Both of my kids (12 and 13 year old girls) have one (one black, one white, otherwise identical). As a result, they don't have radios, TVs or CDs. And if I knew how to set up so that it could be turned off at night but still function reliably as an alarm clock (I sure it's very simple but it's way down my priorities list) then the only other electrical item left in their bedrooms would be the desk lights.
My kids don't buy CDs because they listen to music using Deezer or Spotify. I buy more CDs than ever... ...because I have started listening to Deezer and Spotify.
> A laptop should be as small as possible with a screen and > keyboard that are, at the same time, as large as possible. > It should be (thermally) cool but pack the fastest CPU. > . It should be light (weight) with gigs of ram and teras > of disk space and a stonking great battery (that is also > tiny and light) and can power all of the above, all day. > It should be (socially) cool and also be cheap.
What I am saying is that I would be fine with a slower CPU, less RAM and a small HD but I still want a large screen and keyboard. There seems to be a perception wit the manufacturers that there's no market for that kind of thing but I think there is.
In other words, I'd buy a netbook if it weren't miniaturized. For me it's not the screen as much as the keyboard. I want a full sized keyboard and I don't mean standard laptop sized. I'd be fine with a wide and short screen. You could even split the screen in half as if you had two monitors.
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