...to haul back and fro from college and keep a 4GB SD card in it, and toss Xubuntu on it for kicks.

Opinions?

out of stock, its weird too. I find it odd that such a small thing is that cheap....why?

regardless, if you can get xubuntu to work on it flawlessly, i will buy one too. Same "college" situation.

Oh and it seems too me, that with no disk drive, it might be a bitch to try and install with a live cd....sigh.

After checking to see how to instal I am not going to buy that... Yet another way to install Ubuntu 7.10 to ASUS Eee PC « Samiux’s Blog

To much to do, lots of bugs with ubuntu.

They did make a custom Xubuntu install for Eee PCs.


eeeXubuntu

For $500 you can get a real notebook from Dell with built in wireless, a CD writer combo drive etc - and with Dell I have found they will always give you a further $50 off if you order on the phone and ask nicely. And at 2.7kg a notebook really isn't tremendously heavy to carry around. This gadget seems cute and all, but it should be significantly cheaper. Plus I'd much rather be looking at a 15" screen than a 7" screen.

the bad thing it's a dell

I actually almost religiously avoided mass produced PCs from the big companies (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc) for many years, always choosing to build my own. But finally I succumbed and bought the last 2 from Dell for simplicity, and lack of spare time to research , shop for parts and build a new machine. I have had absolutely nothing to complain about with either machine.

On the price thing - somebody mentioned cheapo desktops in another ticket, and it came to light there are desktops now from Walmart starting at $199. $278 gets 1Gb RAM, DVD-RW and Vista bundled (not that I personally would want Vista, but still). Prices are really extraordinary in the USA. I don't think you could find something similar here in Australia for less than $700AU, (say $600US).

I've never had any significant problems with Dell machines. Like kevmartin I went through the build-my-own stage, but eventually realized it isn't really worth the time and effort unless you're needing something bleeding edge. You can't build for less than one of these manufacturers can make it.

Before buying a machine, I like to see if the case is close to standard. With my old sony, the power supply was just above the ram, so It was the largest pain to put in.

dell orders their own parts that doesn't work in anything else (don't know if they are like that now)