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You've had this coming since the day you arrived

22 November 2008 21:50

Yesterday I wrote that I'd ordered a new ASUS EEE PC, the 901 model, and today it arrived. The machine is gorgeous though I suspect in the long term I'll regret ordering the white model.

This entry was written on the device, slowly due to my fat fingers, with its new Debian Lenny operating system. To save time I didn't even use the default system, I just immediately rebooted it into the installer via a 2Gb USB stick.

Unfortunately I had to run through the installation twice, because I made some bad partitioning decisions and decided to fix them rather than live with them.

Happily everything on the device appears to work perfectly, although there were a few hiccups along the way. The only niggle is that suspend to RAM seems a little flaky; 50% of the time I try to resume and just get a blank window not my X.org desktop. Happily suspend-to-disk works perfectly, and the bootup/restoration process looks very pretty with the splashy package installed.

There are times when I really love using Debian, and this is definitely one of them. Together we've produced an operating system which just works on an amazing array of devices and systems and gets better and better as time goes on!

For example in the past I'd always regarded Network Manager as "that thing we remove to stop breaking our system" - but now I see it working correctly with no effort on my part at all. Amazing!

I guess I'll be returning my Nokia internet tablet in the near future. This device is bigger, but much more capable and versatile.

ObFilm: St Trinians (the recent remake; not too bad. Bonus points for the Shampoo cover).

| 5 comments

 

Comments on this entry

icon Steve Kemp at 14:44 on 23 November 2008

That makes a lot of sense. I guess I'd rather have ugly and working than pretty and failing half the time.

Although from reading some of your past blog entries on suspending I kinda get the feeling that a lot of this stuff only works by accident at the best of times..

icon Matthew Garrett at 14:20 on 23 November 2008
splashy requires vesafb, which generally interacts poorly with anything we do to reinitialise the graphics hardware.
icon Matthew Garrett at 13:18 on 23 November 2008
If you remove splashy and boot without any vga= parameter, does suspend work more reliably?
icon Marius Gedminas at 11:26 on 23 November 2008
Interestingly, the reverse thing happened to me: I stopped using my Asus Eee PC 900 after a couple of weeks, and I still use my Nokia Internet Tablet.
icon Steve Kemp at 13:20 on 23 November 2008

Yes, removing splashy makes software suspend work much better. How odd.