Turns out that the newer version of the madwifi drivers that Ubuntu Eee ships with don’t get on too well with the wifi chipset in the Eee 701, but an older version doesn’t have that issue. So I’ve just downloaded, compiled and installed these and it’s all good.

Fortunately this is now documented on the Ubuntu Eee wiki (which it wasn’t when I first started looking into this problem) and hopefully will be fixed fully in a future Ubuntu Eee release.

Install was easy, running off my USB stick that I had set up following instructions on the Ubuntu Eee website – with the traditional live-USB style beforehand so I could test that things work.

So far things are good, and in installing it over the recovery partition too I’ve managed to gain some more space for things I want to install, which is certainly nice. The one issue I have encountered is that the wifi seems to be stuck in some sort of powersaving mode as it works in bursts, which is a touch annoying, but I haven’t looked at this properly yet.

The interface is intuitive and good, very similar to the default Xandros one in terms of the large icons on the home app that sits above the desktop and all in all I like the way it works.

So, as I’ve recently done a bit more work on Choob I decided to have a look at getting a development environment for this, using Eclipse, set up. This wasn’t exactly easy, given the limited set of packages available by default for the version of Xandros on the Eee, but I’d already worked around this following some instructions on the internet elsewhere – enabling me to install subversion.

The next challenge was finding enough space to install both Eclipse and the JDK in, as preferably these would both want to be on the local machine rather than any additional storage. In the end I opted to (rather than uninstall something like Open Office) move some of the contents of /usr/share (for things I rarely use) onto my SD card and just link to them. Hack-tastic.

So, I was set, all that remained was to use Eclipse. As the Eee is quite low-specced, I had anticipated plentiful performance problems, however I was pleasantly surprised. Start up time is a couple of minutes, which is quite standard, and once going it runs quite well. Occasionally some actions (usually where a amount of building is required) will take a while, but on the whole it’s perfectly usable – provided I’ve got the external monitor and keyboard plugged in. I’ve yet to try it on the Eee’s standard setup, but I suspect it’s not particularly great, although I’m sure I’ll end up doing this at some point soon.

Working from home is an interesting experience for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the difference in surroundings, which brings about a whole different mindset. I found that it was a lot more relaxed working at home, and despite the distractions (such as the xbox and my DVD collection) remarkably productive. Perhaps this was because of the lack of other distractions (workmates asking me questions), or perhaps it’s just because I knew I needed to get stuff done.

Due to my desktop being hooked up to my TV, I actually decided to use my EeePC as the thinclient through which I would remote desktop into my machine in the office. This works remarkably well, especially once an external monitor and keyboard are connected, as I’ve just plugged in the Eee, removed the battery, and have a near-silent machine to use for work.

Unfortunately remote desktop, especially over Citrix, isn’t the best thing in the world; especially not for programming. A number of issues seem to be prevalent, especially with modifier keys such as shift. This doesn’t make things particularly easy, although I am getting used to using caps-lock again for writing things where capital letters are required. The latency on the connection isn’t always great either, with a noticeable lag between hitting a key and it appearing on the screen.

Of course being in the office has the advantage that you can more easily communicate with the people you are working with. Sure, I may have listed the lack of distraction from them as an advantage above, but there’s a bigger one in being able to quickly chat with someone and draw a diagram on a bit of paper – as opposed to either trying to describe it over the phone, or find some software to sketch it out on the PC with.

All in all, being able to work from home is a fantastic tool – especially in IT where things can go wrong at any time of night, and getting into the office might not be so easy. Of course, I’m hoping that that I won’t have to do that any time soon, but it’s always a useful ability to have. Admittedly living twenty minutes from the office means that I can get in quite comfortably, and for the majority of situations I’ll prefer to go into the office and use a real machine – if only to get around the aforementioned problems with latency and RDP over Citrix. I’m equally sure, however, that this weekend won’t be the last time I do a decent amount of work from home as something will inevitably come up that will ensure I need to.

Sure, it’s tiny and doesn”t have much in the way of power (although at 900MHz/512MB of RAM it’s more powerful than my X21) but the keyboard is still more than big enough to allow me to touchtype on it with minimal mistakes and the screen is big enough for most uses. As noted in Skumby’s blog post on it it doesn’t really work too well with websites such as Google Maps.

By default the Eee comes with Xandros Linux installed, although the manual does have instructions on how to install Windows XP and which elements can be removed in order to make it fit on the 4GB drive, most of which is actually taken up by the restore image. For me this is fine, as it means I have access to the utilities that I’m used to on my other machines. At the moment there seems to be a limited number of additional packages available in the official repository, but from what I’ve read this is increasing.

All in all it’s a very nifty little device that will certainly do me fine for my portable computing requirements.