Defining what I actually NEED

After taking my Eeepc away on a trip to Italy, I’m now starting to work out what applications I need and don’t need. The following is what I’m actually using (or am keeping because I think I might need them):

  • Gedit and Terminal (with which I can do most things)
  • Firefox
  • Evolution (yes, I use Evolution on a tiny laptop and it works for me)
  • Emapthy (for IM – it’s the future so I thought I’d start using it now)
  • OpenOffice.org (for presentations and reading documents sent to me)
  • VLC & Rhythmbox (for the growing collection of media on my spare SD card)

Apart from that, I don’t use anything graphical, and I’ve also got rid of anything that requires a CD drive, or bluetooth, or anything that the Eeepc doesn’t actually have.

Now to think about streamlining my other computers and also investigating why my external keyboard died half way through this post.

EeePC

I’ve finally got round to getting an EeePC, and so far I’m really impressed. I’ve installed the latest version of Mandriva on it, and have a very functional Gnome desktop, which does everything I need it to do.

Installing Mandriva was a breeze – it was just a case of changing the BIOS to boot from my external CD drive, and also to enable wireless at boot so that the right modules were loaded. I’ve uninstalled a load of stuff I don’t need, added a couple of things, and at present I’ve still got 1.2gb free on the 4gb internal flash card.

I plan on getting another 4gb card and installing the original EeePC OS onto it for testing purposes.