I wanted to update my progress with the EEE PC since yesterday.  Bad news first, I can’t get my jerry rigged external DVD drive to be recognized by the EEE so I haven’t yet gotten XP installed on it.  I’ve got a few leads for how I might be able to do it with a USB flash drive, but I’d rather get a working dvd drive figured out.  Another similar option would be to try EEEKubuntu, a build of the KDE version of Ubuntu designed for the EEE.  Again though, I’d rather get a working dvd drive to install XP from.

Anyway, on to some good news.  I was planning on waiting until I got my Amex rebate at Costco to get a new portable USB powered external hdd to pair with the EEE since it only has 8gigs of internal storage (4 on the ssd and 4 on the sdhc card).  I stopped at Circuit City, to see if I could find a cheap solution to my external DVD drive issues, and found a 160gig western digital pocket drive on sale for $110, cheaper than at Costco.  So I went ahead and bought that too since I was planning on getting it anyway.  The best part is when I got home I discovered that the EEE does in fact put out enough juice through it’s USB ports to power the drive.  I was afraid (after reading somewhere) that it didn’t put out the full 5v needed for powered USB devices but everything seemed to be working so I’m not going to complain!  I also went ahead and used the photos from our VFC photo walk today as a trial for how long it would take to transfer images from my CF card to the external hdd.  I transfered 660mb of data and it took about 10 minutes.  Not going to set any speed records but nothing to be embarrassed about.  It’s also worth noting that this was with my slower Ultra II CF card, my 4gig main card is almost twice as fast, definitely fast enough to serve that purpose.  It would be nice if I can find a codec for linux that lets me view the .cr2 files so that I can at least get some idea of what I’ve got.  Unless I’m able to get XP on this thing I don’t think I’m going to be doing much if anything as far as image editing but as someone mentioned earlier today in a piece I was reading, it would be nice to at least get a jump start on my workflow before getting back.  If I can at least get Gimp on here that will let me play with the pics I take on my Sony since those are in JPG.  Anyway, I think that’s about it for now, I’m going to do some more reading about the EEE and see if there are any other tweeks I can do if I can’t get XP figured out.  Off to Geekland!

Filed under: life by Jonathan Assink