[TriLUG] hands-on Eee

[Brian Phelps]

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 01:10 -0400, Maxwell Spangler wrote:
> Can we see an hdparm -tT on the flash based disc space on your EEE pc?
> 
> Also (to the group), since flash memory can only be written to so many times, 
> does that mean that EEEPC might have longevity problems that a laptop with 
> replacement hard drives wouldn't have?  Will EEEpcs just become flaky in the 
> long term and be unuseable due to soldered flash memory? curious.
> 
The flash is likely ide bus flash, but an eee-pc owner would know for
sure.  If so you could upgrade when it gets cheaper.  Wear leveling is
handled by the hardware on ide flash.  You get 10k or so writes or so on
any one bit with flash, but that is scattered about on the drive to
avoid wear.  It won't be using swap, thats for sure.  Just make sure you
have plenty of ram and use a lighter desktop than Gnome or KDE.  

I have played around with an OLPC, as well as my own home brewed
(IDE-based) flash linux systems.  Boot time is still slow (who the hell
started this flash=quickboot myth anyway?), maybe the IDE bus is a
bottleneck.  On my systems the filesystem is RO, so there's no worry
about flash wear.  Linux hates a RO filesystem without ramdisk & unionfs
trickery.



> On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, Jim Tuttle wrote:
> 
> > I was hoping to bring mine (well, it actually belongs to the Libraries)
> > to the April 10th meeting, but I have to pick my wife up from the
> > airport.  People are free to drop by the NC State Libraries (D.H. Hill)
> > and try mine.  Parking will likely kill you, though.
> >
> > Jim
> >
> >
> > om Roche wrote:
> >> Douglas Ward Thu Mar 27 12:35:46 EDT 2008
> >> > I saw a big [Asus] Eee pc display at the computer shop next to the
> >> > Alltel store on Walnut Street in Cary.  Don't remember the name of
> >> > the pc shop,
> >>
> >> Anything PC
> >> http://www.anythingpc.net/index.html
> >>
> >> Doesn't have hours on their site, but IIRC they're MTHF 10-8, W 10-6,
> >> S 10-4, closed U.
> >>
> >> > It's in the big Best Buy shopping center across the street from
> >> > Crossroads Ford.
> >>
> >> Correct. When I went in Saturday, I didn't see a big display, but they
> >> did have a 4G available for use (though not on wireless, alas), so I
> >> was able to ascertain that
> >>
> >> * the screen, though definitely small, is usable
> >>
> >> * the keyboard will take some getting used to
> >>
> >> * performance seemed snappy (with the caveat that it wasn't really
> >>    networking)
> >>
> >> * Xandros is not too weird
> >>
> >> FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>
> >
> >
> >
> 
> -- 
> -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Maxwell Spangler
> Research Triangle Park, North Carolina