{"id":2441,"date":"2018-11-03T05:07:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-03T05:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/?p=2441"},"modified":"2018-11-04T08:13:25","modified_gmt":"2018-11-04T08:13:25","slug":"the-asus-eee-how-close-did-the-world-come-to-a-linux-desktop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/2018\/11\/03\/the-asus-eee-how-close-did-the-world-come-to-a-linux-desktop\/","title":{"rendered":"The Asus Eee: How Close Did the World Come to a Linux Desktop?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was white, not much bigger than my hands held side by side, weighed
\nabout as much as a bottle of wine, and it came in a shiny, faux-leather case. It
\nwas the $199 Asus Eee 901, and I couldn’t believe that a computer could be
\nthat powerful, that light and that much fun.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the story of the brief, shining history of the Asus Eee, the
\nfirst netbook\u2014a small, cheap and mostly well-made laptop that dominated
\nthe computer industry for two or three years about a decade go. It’s not so
\nmuch that the Eee was ahead of its time, which wasn’t that difficult in an
\nindustry then dominated by pricey and bulky laptops that didn’t always have
\na hard drive and by desktop design hadn’t evolved much past the first IBM
\n8086 box.<\/p>\n

Rather, the Eee was ahead of everyone’s time. It ran a Linux
\noperating system with a tabbed interface and splashy icons, and the hardware
\nincluded wireless, Bluetooth, a webcam and an SSD hard drive\u2014all in a
\nmachine that weighed just 2.5 pounds. In this, it teased many of the concepts
\nthat tech writer Mark Wilson says we take for granted in today’s cloud,
\nsmartphone and Chromebook universe.<\/p>\n

The Eee was so impressive that even Microsoft, whose death grip on the
\nPC world seemed as if it would never end, took notice. As everyone from Dell to
\nHP to Samsung to Toshiba to Sony to Acer to one-offs and “never-weres” raced
\nnetbooks into production, Microsoft offered manufacturers a version of Windows
\nXP (and later a truncated Windows 7) to cram onto the machines. Because we
\ncan’t have the masses running a Linux OS, can we?<\/p>\n

“The Eee gave regular people something they couldn’t have
\nbefore”, says Dan Ackerman, a longtime section editor at CNET who wrote
\nsome of the website’s original Eee and netbook reviews. “Laptops had
\nalways been ridiculously expensive. The Eee wasn’t, and it gave regular
\npeople a chance to buy a laptop that was smaller and more portable and that
\nthey could be productive with. I always gave Asus credit\u2014they understood
\nthe role of form and function.”<\/p>\n

Netbook History<\/h3>\n

The computer world never had really seen anything like the first Eee,
\nwhich didn’t even have a name when it was launched in 2007 (although it
\nlater would be called both the 701 and the 4G). In fact, say those who reviewed the
\n701, it wasn’t so much a product but a proof of concept\u2014that Asus
\ncould make something that small and that cheap that worked.<\/p>\n

There had been small laptops before, of course, like the Intel
\nClassmate PC and the OLPC X0-1, each part of the One Laptop per Child project.
\nBut those were specialized machines designed to bring computing and the
\ninternet to students throughout the world, and not necessarily consumer
\nproducts.<\/p>\n

The netbook’s immediate predecessors were probably the palmtop and
\nthe personal digital assistant, or PDA. These were handheld devices like the
\nPsion 7 and the HP Jornada 720 that did some computer things, including word
\nprocessing and email (and faxes in the late 1990s models). But they were slow
\nand under-powered (remember Windows CE?), and it wasn’t easy to work with the
\ntiny screens. In many ways, they were unsophisticated smartphones that
\ncouldn’t make phone calls.<\/p>\n

I used a Jornada 720 around the turn of the century. It was cheaper and
\nmore reliable than my previous two laptops, which were buggy, crash-prone and
\nalways seemed to have something wrong with the disk drive. I could sort of type
\non the Jornada’s downsized QWERTY keyboard, and it synced with my desktop
\n(though the modem never really worked).<\/p>\n

But the netbook’s true predecessor was almost certainly Radio
\nShack’s legendary TRS-80 model 100\u2014or as we lovingly called in in the
\nnewspaper business, the Trash 80. It ran on Microsoft Basic and had a more or
\nless full-sized keyboard, a monochromatic screen that displayed about ten lines
\nof type and a 300-baud modem. The Trash 80 weighed about three pounds, and I
\nlugged it to football games, bike races and city council meetings in the late
\n1980s. There, I would write the story, hook the modem up to a phone jack
\n(acoustic couplers before that) and send it to the paper by hitting a
\ncombination of buttons located just above the keyboard. Would that any of my
\nlaptops had worked that well.<\/p>\n

In other words, there hadn’t been anything quite like the Eee 701
\nin 20 years.<\/p>\n

“I can’t say I remember exactly walking into the room when Asus
\nshowed us the first Eee, but I do remember that I had never seen anything quite
\nlike it”, says Ackerman. “It was an amazing accomplishment for the
\nprice.”<\/p>\n

Yes, the price. In 2005, the average laptop cost about $1,000, and you
\ndidn’t get all that much for a grand\u2014an HDD drive, wireless, a
\ntouchpad and maybe an optical drive. But you also got a bulky machine that
\nweighed five or six pounds with crummy battery life\u2014often as little as two
\nhours.<\/p>\n

The 701, on the other hand, cost $199, weighed half as much as the
\n$1,000 laptop, sometimes had better battery life, and it came with some of the
\nsame hardware (minus the optical drive). And, you could argue that its tiny SSD
\ndrive was an improvement over the era’s 20 and 30GB laptop hard
\ndrives\u2014quieter, less power hungry and more nimble. Yes, the processor
\nwasn’t as fast, it had less RAM, and the screen was smaller, but that
\ndidn’t seem to matter.<\/p>\n

“It was a crazy concept, but there was an incredible response”,
\nsays Wilson, today a senior writer at Fast Company. “Within six months, it
\nseemed like every computer maker was cloning it.”<\/p>\n

Get Me Linux<\/h3>\n

How did Asus get the price so low? Cutting the weight helped. Using
\ncheaper materials for the body, keyboard and screen made a difference too, as
\ndid the less expensive processor and memory. But one of the most important
\nfactors was substituting Linux for Windows.<\/p>\n

An Asus spokesman did not respond to several requests for information
\nfor this story, but those with knowledge of the company’s thinking said
\nchoice of operating system was crucial in lowering the Eee’s price. A
\nMicrosoft license, depending on who you talk to, could have cost almost as much
\nas the netbook’s suggested retail price. Even if Asus had absorbed some of
\nthe license fee, it would have been almost impossible to hit $199, then
\nconsidered the sweet spot for pricing.<\/p>\n

Enter Xandros, the operating system that Asus used on the Linux-powered
\nversions of the Eee. It was perhaps the machine’s greatest asset and its
\nbiggest weakness. Since it was Linux, there was no Microsoft licensing fee,
\nmaking it easier for Asus to hit $199. But Xandros was not quite open-source
\nLinux\u2014it was a commercial product from the same-named British company
\nwhose revenue came from “partnering” with OEMs. Which, of course, is
\nwhat Microsoft did.<\/p>\n

And, as anyone who knows anything about the Linux community will tell
\nyou, any open-source company with a Microsoft-like business plan can’t
\nreally be open-source or true to the spirit of Linux. In this, Asus alienated
\nthe people who should have been the Eee’s biggest supporters. Look on
\nbulletin board and Reddit posts, and you’ll still see some of the
\nresentment at the choice of Xandros.<\/p>\n

Xandros’ other problem? It was just a little too Linux for the
\nmillions of people who bought it and who were used to Windows. It’s not to
\nsay that Xandros didn’t try\u2014the company’s mission was to be a
\nWindows-like interface to Linux, and it was based on Debian, just like Ubuntu
\nand Linux Mint.<\/p>\n

But those of us who came to Linux through the Eee had never seen
\nanything quite like Xandros. It was was funky, to say the least, and this comes
\nfrom someone who had had his fill of Windows by then (Windows ME, anyone?). I
\nwas desperate to run something that didn’t make me pound the keyboard in
\nfrustration at every crash, Control-Alt-Delete and hanging screen.<\/p>\n

Today, a browser-based OS like Chrome is second nature; in 2007, it
\ncould be befuddling to anyone who grew up pointing and clicking in Windows 95.
\nXandros, save for the word processor, email and browser, was a
\nmystery\u2014to this day, I still don’t know what something called mediaU was supposed
\nto do. It was almost impossible to add new software, and if you wanted to do
\nanything other than basic software updates, you had to use the command line. I
\nhad been through that with DOS\u2014I didn’t want to do it again. And, of
\ncourse, support was non-existent.<\/p>\n

To be fair, Asus was limited in its choices. Mint was still in its
\nearly stages, Ubuntu wouldn’t release its netbook OS until 2009, and Fedora
\nprobably wasn’t quite right for something like this. But, as Wilson says
\nwith a laugh: “Xandros was the kind of Linux that reminded people why they
\ndidn’t want to use Linux.”<\/p>\n

Running Scared<\/h3>\n

It’s almost impossible to believe, a decade later, how popular
\nnetbooks were in the wake of the Eee. Way past popular, actually: the netbook
\nwas the best-selling computer in the world in 2009, with seven-fold growth from
\n2008 and some 20 million sold. That accounted for almost 10% of the
\nentire computer market at a time when the recession saw desktop computer sales
\nfall 12%, the worst decline in its history.<\/p>\n

Asus gloried in the Eee’s success. It updated the netbook every
\ncouple of months, adding power and improving screen size and resolution. CNET
\nreviewed eight versions in 12 months, and even the most expensive cost one-half
\nof a typical laptop of the time.<\/p>\n

The 900, the first real production model, had a 9″ screen, a 4GB
\nSSD and 1 GB of RAM. I literally wore it out, using it until I cracked the
\nkeyboard and broke the A key off. I replaced it with the Eee 1005 a year
\nlater, which had a 10″ screen, 2GB of RAM, a 160GB HHD and four hours of
\nbattery life. I still have it, and it works as well as it ever did. The 1101,
\nmeanwhile, had an 11.6″ screen and a 160GB HDD and still weighed just
\nthree pounds.<\/p>\n

Netbooks and the Eee were so successful, in fact, that research
\nanalysts who followed Apple\u2014whose top executives had famously called the
\nmachines “junk”\u2014warned the company that it had better do
\nsomething to compete. Mac sales fell in 2008, the first decline in five and
\na half
\nyears, and an analyst told Computerworld<\/em>: “Vendors are waking up to the
\nfact that people respond to so-called ‘good-enough’ computing. They
\ndon’t really need all the power of a Core 2 Duo CPU most of the time.”<\/p>\n

But Apple wasn’t the only company that saw the netbook as a threat.
\nSo did Microsoft, whose abhorrence of Linux was part of the company’s DNA
\n(remember “Linux is a cancer”?). A Microsoft spokesman did not respond
\nto several requests for information for this story, so it’s difficult to
\nknow exactly what the company thought. But, says Wilson, “though I
\ndon’t presume to speak for Microsoft, for about six months to a year, they
\nhad to be worried. There were not a lot of phenomenons in the laptop world at
\nthe time.”<\/p>\n

The Microsoft dilemma: it was phasing out Windows XP, which could and
\ndid run on some early netbooks, in favor of Windows Vista. But, reported the
\nNew York Times<\/em> in April 2009, it was “downright embarrassing that Vista is
\ntoo tubby to run well on on the best-selling laptops in the market”. Hence,
\nMicrosoft had to find a way to cram the desktop version of Windows 7 onto a
\nnetbook.<\/p>\n

Which it did, though the results left much to be desired. I
\n“activated” the so-called Windows 7 Starter version on a friend’s
\nnetbook; it literally took all night to install, clacking and churning and
\nrebooting. And then rebooting some more. “They got Windows working on
\nnetbooks”, says Ackerman, “and if it didn’t work well, it worked
\nwell enough”.<\/p>\n

More important, Microsoft cut the Windows 7 licensing fee for
\nnetbooks by one-third. It was $75 a copy for a desktop, but only $25 for
\nnetbooks (which it had apparently charged for XP on netbooks too).<\/p>\n

This was the beginning of the end. Wrote the Times<\/em>: “[C]onsumers
\nhave shown their preference for Windows on netbooks….Linux went from
\nalmost 100 percent share on netbooks in the early days to just 20 percent after
\nMicrosoft started offering Windows XP on the systems.”<\/p>\n

A Fond Memory<\/h3>\n

So much for Linux for the masses. But worse was yet to come for the
\nEee: Apple released and refined the iPad and the iPod Touch during the next
\ncouple years. Even more important, it unveiled the iPhone 3GS in June 2009.
\nOne million 3GSes were sold in three days, and consumers\u2014thanks to
\nthe revolutionary Apple app store\u2014discovered they didn’t need a
\ncomputer to send email, listen to music or browse the web. And, at $99, the
\n3GS undercut the Eee on price. The modern smartphone had arrived.<\/p>\n

The Eee and netbooks didn’t go away immediately, of course. Genuine
\nefforts were made to keep it relevant\u2014Asus released the $500 1201 in
\n2010, with a 12.1″ screen and more-or-less desktop resolution. The Linux
\ncommunity, meanwhile, offered operating systems like Ubuntu netbook,
\nEasyPeasy\/Ubuntu Eee, Joliecloud and Peppermint OS. But the 1201 wasn’t so
\nmuch a netbook as the forerunner to the ultrabook, and only those of us who
\nwanted to run Linux instead of Windows would spend the time to install one of
\nthe new OSes over Windows and the few Xandros machines that were still
\nbeing sold.<\/p>\n

The end came in 2012, when Acer said it would stop production, and Asus
\ndiscontinued the Eee. Tellingly, more tablets were sold than netbooks that
\nyear. But the Eee lives on, and not just because those of us who still have one
\nor two will pop a thumbdrive into one of its slots, load Puppy or Antix or
\nLubuntu, and give it a whirl.<\/p>\n

Today’s high-end laptops adapted the Eee’s strengths\u2014battery life and
\nweight, among others\u2014and combined it with high-end
\nspecs. And, frankly, anyone who has negotiated a smartphone home screen,
\nflicking those big, shiny icons, is doing about what we did with Xandros and
\nits home screen on the Eee 901.<\/p>\n

And it lives on in the Chromebook: a simple, inexpensive and
\nlightweight laptop that does what most people need a computer to do\u2014send
\nemail, browse the internet and do word processing. And it does it all through
\na browser window without the blue screen of death, Control-Alt-Delete, and
\nupdates that need to reboot and reboot and reboot. And then reboot again.<\/p>\n

And isn’t that what computing should be about?<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was white, not much bigger than my hands held side by side, weighed about as much as a bottle of wine, and it came in a shiny, faux-leather case. It was the $199 Asus Eee 901, and I couldn’t believe that a computer could be that powerful, that light and that much fun. This … <\/p>\n

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