I wouldn't call what I have a strong grasp (it's closer to a tenuous one), but I have a similar small form-factor laptop (Acer Aspire One) powered by the same chipset with the same stats, and I have nothing but good things to say about it. I was fully expecting the performance to be horrid, but it isn't. The battery life is pretty solid on mine (you'll do even better here with solid stage storage), and it's even fast enough to run some older games.

I know one EEE owner with a slightly older model, and he seems to like it, so there's that.

Get it!
I have one and I absolutely love it.

I use it mainly for programming and surfing. But it is able to play games too.
The performance is much better than I expected.

When at home I plug in external mouse, keyboard, monitor and it is really good at displaying large resolution without the performance getting crappy.

It's the only pc I used since the start of this year for my private projects and I'm very pleased with this thing.

Whenever people ask me about it I recommend it without restrictions.

I'm running Windows XP.
A friend of mine installed Ubuntu on his. There is a special EEEPc version.
He instlled it and he said everything is working flawlessly.

So if you want to go with linux the EEEpc is a good choice as well.

If you have some detailed questions about the ubunt version feel free to ask.
I will ask my freind and then report to you

I'm not really a fan of Ubuntu... Perhaps just because I'm more used to Fedora. Can you just install any Linux system like you typically would? I assume you have full access to the CMOS/etc., or are they locked down in some way?

** EDIT **

Seems there is a Wiki article for Fedora that attempts to list the quirks, etc. Doesn't sound like support is great for the 1000 series though. Maybe I'll try Ubuntu and if I preferred the factory OS revert back. Does anybody know if the Eee PC Linux distribution is available for free download?

Sorry, what? Do you have any idea what you're talking about or did you just feel like posting baseless random nonsense?
Anyway, if you're looking for a really low-cost laptop, Apple doesn't make those anyway.

Anyway, Eee-pc should do. I didn't get one myself because I felt it to be a little bit too limited, and the battery life wasn't that great. It seems to have become quite a bit better on both fronts.

They didn't do six hours back when I looked at them - I think their estimated battery life was something like three, maybe four hours back then.
Yes, six hours seems to be quite good for a laptop (the iBook I got instead of an Eee-pc did six hours when the battery was new), but honestly I don't think six hours of battery life is actually that great.
I guess that means I'm saying that all laptops have poor battery life in my opinion, which is true.

A Mac is definitely not the solution for you and I don't recommend you buy one. But I would comment on the following...

The OS X subsystem is more or less separate from the BSD subsystem. Places like /Library/Frameworks contain NextStep frameworks. These are separate from the UNIX-style libraries in /lib and so on. Programs are free to use any mix of either.

There are certainly things about the OS you would find objectionable. X11 applications are unavoidably second class; the X11 window server runs on top of OS X incurring extra startup time for all X11 applications.

The UNIX filing hierarchy simply isn't user friendly. For example, under OS X every file that forms part of an application is contained in a single atomic application bundle. The standard method of installing an application is download a disk image, mount it, drag the application (which looks and acts like a single icon) from the disk image to wherever you want to keep it, eject disk image. Standard method of uninstalling is drag application to the trash, empty the trash.

Although application bundles are now used by applications to do everything that was done with resource forks in ye olde Mac OS, resource forks remain and are used for such things as individual file associations (extensions are used to pick a default application, but you can set which application a specific file is associated with irrespective of its extension).

Your comment is clearly ridiculous. Apple acquired OS X by purchasing NextStep. The operating system that is now OS X was NextStep. The name of the company changed, but the employees didn't. If you think Apple is significantly different from NextStep then you clearly think Steve Jobs isn't a significant part of Apple.

In addition, Apple continue to commit code back to the open source projects whose components they use (including substantial improvements to GCC), and that's why you'll see things like the WebKit core. The optimisation and standards compliance work they've done with it make it a central component of the iPhone. Yet, it's a KHTML fork and they continue to keep all developments quickly and easily publicly available and to foster a development community around it. So you'll also find it in places like Android and Symbian, i.e. exactly the devices that will probably push the iPhone from its consumer sales pedestal.

I'd be interested to hear your grounds for calling these Microsoft-style developments. At the minute it just sounds like baseless trolling.

I thoroughly disagree, and I think you've reached that conclusion because you adopt a thoroughly limited definition of 'professionals'. I'm a firm believer in computers as tools regardless of your profession. I don't see how the UNIX level of complexity is in any way beneficial to architects or to nurses or to writers or to accountants or to [lengthy list omitted].

I think the usual computer science maxims of the best designs coming at extremes applies. Compromises are usually a mish-mashed mess and Windows with the registry and the Windows filesystem hierarchy is the compromise. Quite possibly we're both sitting here in disagreement because we know our extreme and we've seen the compromise and we're incorrectly extrapolating?

From your comments so far, your definition of 'sensible' seems to be nothing more than "like classic UNIX". Please explain further why you think the OS X layout is unsensible, given that everybody acknowledges that it differs from the UNIX Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

No, you have a mistaken idea of the history. The very first work on what is now NextStep began with the Mach kernel. Its big idea was to extend what UNIX does (or did, we're in history here) with pipes (ie, everything is a file; every program merely processes a form of input to produce a form of output; pipes simultaneously do away with a bunch of complexity and grant a great degree of flexibility) to inter-process communications. The consequence of that is that you can move nearly everything out of kernelspace. So the kernel is reduced to doing merely memory management, marshalling hardware access rights and ensuring threads can communicate; everything else is in userspace where it's much more secure and much easier to develop. Unfortunately, in practice it was soon discovered that the cost of that degree of process hopping made the design highly inefficient. Modern Mach kernels are much more of a pragmatic compromise between the original design and the traditional monolithic kernel.

Anyway, the kernel was designed to be a drop-in replacement for the BSD kernel. One of the main figures in Mach's development was Avie Tevanian (fear not; I just looked that up) who was hired by Steve Jobs at NextStep to produce the NextStep operating system. This was before X-Windows was any sort of standard, indeed before the X11 protocol had even been developed. So NextStep wasn't a deviation from the existing UNIX norms in most significant respects, it took a new kernel, added a BSD layer for back end and commandline stuff, then built a modern desktop OS on top of all that, targetting design professionals. The entire GUI is drawn in Postscript (a massive improvement over the competition, something that Microsoft have only managed to come up with an equivalent to in Windows Vista), the core language was fully reflective and massively capable, it had the first fully object oriented development environment outside of research and the very first rapid application development tools. They were breaking new ground, which is why NextStep was the first home of the World Wide Web and of Doom and Quake. To criticise them now for corrupting UNIX just because the UNIX most people use is the result of entirely separate, subsequent developments isn't particularly fair.

Incidentally, when Apple bought NextStep, Avie became Senior VP of Engineering at Apple and stayed until 2006. That means that the same operating system was primarily engineered by the same man for 20 years. It is therefore incorrect to cast the situation as Apple buying something that existed and subsequently morphing it.

EDIT: My belief that the computer should be a tool is also why I'm a huge fan of the Eee and the other netbooks, by the way. If they're UNIX underneath then that's fine, I just love the idea that — at least fleetingly — there's a platform that I can recommend to budget conscious relatives who want simply to do internet sites and sometimes open Word documents which they are unlikely to slowly destroy.

Are you fucking serious?

Because we're not supposed to debate the merits and demertits of Apple here, I'll just add the following to what Thomas H. has already said: I pretty much use OS X as a generic UNIX system and have no trouble doing so. The fact that system configuration does not live in /etc does not influence my use of the system in the slightest, that my home directory is under /Users rather than /home is something I never actually notice in practice. That all X11 applications are lumped together in one window group is highly annoying and somewhat stupid, but ultimately something that doesn't hinder me too much.
Macs are popular in academia because you can use them as a UNIX system; it would be at least somewhat foolish for Apple to turn away from that.

It does?

trent-gamblins-macbook:Monster2 trent$ ls /
Applications			etc
Desktop DB			home
Desktop DF			mach_kernel
Developer			mach_kernel.ctfsys
Library				net
Network				nul
System				opt
User Guides And Information	private
Users				sbin
Volumes				tmp
bin				usr
cores				var
dev

Oh wait, nvm, you said finder. I've never been one to use file managers much.

Have you tried the Samsung NC10? it gets very good reviews.