[Wear-Hard] First impression - eeepc as wearable, up and running

[Greg Priest-Dorman]

Hi Folks,

Well it had to happen, that's why I purchased the extended warranty.

The video out connector on my Sony UX280p is a litte flaky.  Colors go
in and out and it makes the Microoptical flash in a quite annoying
way.  It is on the sony side (not a problem with the dongle) so I am
going to get to use my "accidental damage" extended warranty.  The
only problem is I was sold a policy with on site 72h coverage and Sony
*now* says that does not apply to the UX series, I have to mail in the
rig.  They agree I bought it from them with that policy, but the
policy, they insist would would not have been sold to me... must
be that alternate timeline thing again.

Anyway, it will be gone for at least 2 weeks and I am sure when I get
it back it will no longer have linux on it...

So, in the meantime, I got a 4gig 512meg Asus eeepc.  Installed
eeeXubuntu on it yesterday, added emacspeak and my text to speech software,
plugged in an additional 4gig stick of flash, my chorder and an extra
battery from batterygeeks and presto! (well, presto with a day of
installs... there's that alternate timeline again) a working wearable!

It's working great!  I have a 1gig ram chip for it, but it is doing
very nicely on 512meg.  Hibernate works fine, so if I go the route of
turning it on and off then I may leave 512meg in it as I figure it
should go into and come out of hibernate faster with less ram, but if
I get good battery life and leave it on all the time with the external
battery (as I am use to doing), I'll bring it up to 1gig.

There is a very strong nostalgia vibe as it reminds me of my gateway
handbook (486 dx2/50) which I ran slackware and emacspeak on way back
when. 

After I use it for 2 weeks I'll try and write something up about it
and post it at www.cs.vassar.edu.  

-Greg

-- 

 Greg Priest-Dorman
 priestdo at cs.vassar.edu