My Eee PC :-)

Finally, I could have my own ASUS Eee PC 1000H.

After delaying the acquisitions for few days due to exchange rates (I really hate the fact that I have to buy things in USD in my own beloved country of Indonesia) but finally decided to buy one anyway on a bright day since I really need a personal laptop and I believe that Eee PC 1000H provide the best value for money that I could afford of.

This is my second owned laptop after years ago I acquire an old Dell Latitude CPi (forgotten the exact version, hmm... ). The CPi took me days just to install Debian Potato on it since it doesn't have CD drive (not internal, not even external, not sure if it could have one , clearly I didn't buy one to test).

My method of installation on the CPi was by using parallel port "laplink" cable and install Debian from a CD drive on another laptop (that is already debianized). The host wast Toshiba Satellite 4600 if am not mistaken. The installation, although long and troublesome, was an _exciting_ adventure. That is also one of the thing that made me awed by Debian, I didn't know any other OS that could be installed like Debian's :-)

Although I felt like telling other fun stories regarding this CPi installation. How I made the hardware works (Sound, yay!) etc, I think it's enough for right now.

Asus Eee PC 1000H is another story. Although it also took me few days to set it up to the way I like it, the experience is much different (with boring problem like ACPI scripts and such, and interesting problem such as installing ubuntu netbook remix).

Overall, the journey still as exciting as ever :-D

Linux Power Consumption

Intel has created powertop [www.linuxpowertop.org], a power consumption watch utilitiy that work very similar to `top` program but this is to watch processes that takes much of your laptop battery life.

In Debian unstable I could just apt-get install powertop to use it. It also has the ability to give many (useful?) suggestions how to save my power. After implement some of them, I get to save a few watts and extends my battery life.

What's also interesting to me, I've learn that accessing gmail from firefox seems to contribute a lot to my laptop power consumption. Heavy javascripts? Don't know, but this may results of me not standing by gmail all the time from now on.