Since Jill started her PhD we’ve been slowly converting the guest room into a home office. For those of you not familiar with grad school and beyond, this is basically a room with a computer, a high capacity printer, and 2,347,345 reams of paper that routinely explode into mountains of tree-killing mayhem.

She has been comfortable with her Dell XPS 1330, but she’s gotten to the point where working out of the couch in a laptop is distracting and a desktop in the middle of a pile of papers started to make sense. I didn’t want to spend too much, so we decided that a full Ubuntu PC would meet her needs. I wanted something quiet and sleek, with a webcam and built in wireless, since I wasn’t about to run a cable up two stories.

After much deliberation I settled on a black friday Amazon deal, $431 for an Asus Eee Top ET2002 (video review) with free shipping. This is an all in one box with a 20” monitor, Atom 330 processor, and 2gb of RAM , and ~240gb drive. This is quite an amazing deal so I went with it. Having seen one of these at an Ubuntu booth at Ontario Linuxfest I was confident that everything would just work. Keep in mind at this price this is the non-touchscreen screen. (EDIT: Correction to the price, this PC was $431, not $331, that would be ridiculous!)

The hardware is nice, it comes in one box and when it’s set up there’s only one cable (power) that you need. The out-of-the-box Vista experience is one of the worst I’ve ever seen from any vendor on any platform. After the 15-minute “finish the OEM OS install” the vendor’s next installer comes in, which installs out of date versions of Adobe Reader, their weird desktop launcher bits, etc. after a reboot it then goes and updates all that software. After (I kid you not), 45 minutes of grinding, the computer was finally ready to use. After I got the hardware info I needed (I could not find any hardware specs on the internet for the wifi so I had to get it from the PC) I went ahead and reached for my Karmic CD. This BIOS in the machine didn’t have an option to PXE boot (which is a shame, it would be a great LTSP client) or boot from USB so I had to use a CD. The install went off without a hitch.

On boot up I set up her account and added the Ubuntu b-sides to take care of the obvious additions. The wireless was odd, it kept conking out every few minutes for about 30 seconds. I thought that an updated driver might do the trick, so I installed the backported new wireless drivers that our kernel team provides and after that the wireless was solid. The wireless card is an Atheros AR9285 btw. After that I added her the PC to the Dropbox account and let it sync overnight.

Some tidbits about the hardware:

• The Atom 330 - I was expecting a typically horrible netbook processor, but this is a really great little chip. It shows up as 4 CPUs (it’s dual cored and hyperthreaded) and is 64 bit capable. I wouldn’t recommend encoding DVDs but for general computing use it did the job and I don’t really complain about it.

• Nvidia ION - Ok, this is fantastic. I’ve switched her over to mplayer to use VDPAU and it just cuts through HD like butter. I am looking forward to having gstreamer-enabled VDPAU in the future so I don’t have to swap the default bits out.

• Flash - is of course still absolutely terrible. However I found a neat plugin that replaces the flash on youtube with the h264 file that they use for the iPhone and then inlines it in the page with html5 video. It’s slick, and more importantly since the ffmpeg in chrome is multithreaded it spreads the decoding over the CPU cores, so the playback is much, much better than the flash video. I’ve asked fta if it’s possible to use the browser’s ffmpeg with a VDPAU backend to accelerate this in hardware, but I haven’t gotten too far into that.

• The hard drive - It’s a pokey 5400rpm drive, was probably used to keep the heat down. This kind of makes IO intensive applications not very fun to use. Firefox was a grindfest, and OOo is not very fun to launch either. However Jill seems to find the OOo performance acceptable and I’ve almost completed moving most of her work to Google Docs anyway.

• Amazon MP3 in 64 bit was annoying to fix, I used some work around on the internet I am not proud of, however I hope to transition to the Ubuntu One music store when it is available. Striving to keep with as much a default install as possible I left Rhythmbox on there for her. Her G1 is detected and syncs as expected.

• The mouse - it’s kind of crap so I replaced it with one she uses for her laptop. In case you’re wondering the colored keyboard in the picture is a gboard, which is a dedicated keyboard for Gmail that the manufacturer sent me to test how well it works in Linux (it works great and ootb with 0 config by the way).

• Suspend and Resume just work, I have it set up to suspend when you hit the power button.

• The Camera works great:

All in all, I think the ET2002 is a great little box, especially for the price I got it at! On some days I go up there and work out of her office and have no problems getting work done. I am mulling replacing the pokey drive with a cheap SSD for noise,heat, and performance win, but this isn’t the kind of machine that has easy to see drive bays or things of that nature so I don’t know if I want to take it apart. The speakers aren’t amazing but good enough to listen to music while working.

I only wish that there was an option for Ubuntu out of the box on an all-in-one so I wouldn’t have had to spend 2 hours making it work better. I think system76 should take the guts of the meerkat and put together something just as compelling! If you’ve seen these with the touchscreen and Ubuntu Netbook Remix (now the Netbook Edition) then you know how cool it can be with the touch stuff.