julio@julio-laptop:~/Projects/web2py/applications/pystack$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           993        607        385          0         22        278
-/+ buffers/cache:        306        686
Swap:         2905          0       2905
julio@julio-laptop:~/Projects/web2py/applications/pystack$

Now, the interesting thing about this setup is that the shown above is on a computer running apache, MySQL, web2py (python web application framework), Wing IDE, at least three instances of Firefox and some Zope work among several other applications. I don't know about you, but I honestly thought that was impossible, but then again, I think it must be that I am using too much windows at work (mandatory, unfortunately).

Meet the ASUS Eee PC (1005-HEB)

I decided to see what the fuss was all about the so-called "netbooks" and got me an incredible deal at newegg (as usual) The computer (my company was kind enough to provide for it), is a really nice piece of technology, sleek, well-designed and f.a.s.t.

My brother laughed at me when I asked him the specs of his own netbook, he told me that he was not even able to sell the "piece of shit" on craigslist, which is too much to say right there, after all, the Intel Atom processor is not known to be a "power-horse" among computers, more likely to power your auntie's notebook which is only used to browse the Internet and sometimes use email...

But I had other plans

The PC came with "Windows 7 Starter", a Nazi-style purposely dumb-down, crippled version of what I believe is the only decent version of windows since windows 2000, my good friend Abhijeet suggested to put Windows 7 "ultimate" but I backed down since that would mean buying the windows license PLUS another gig of RAM to at least run decently, instead, I copied a version of "Ubuntu Netbook Edition" into a USB thumb drive, and off we went.

I decided to clean up the whole thing and reformat the 250 GB HD with Ext4, installed the entire Ubuntu OS (10.04) into it (Asus Eee PC 1005HEB) and see what happens.

What happened is that after installation, the OS recognized the Video Card without any glitch (Intel GMA 3150), Wireless was immediately started and configured, Ethernet worked impeccable, heck, even the front camera works "out-of-the-box", this reminds me when I set up a new version of OS X on my Macs, EVERYTHING works, no questions (read 1000's of dialogs) asked.

My Linux desktop currently is an AMD X2 2.9Ghz Dual Core PC, 4Gb RAM, This little gem rivals in performance hands down, couldn't be happier.