Well, it’s been a week now since it ended and in many ways, I’m still recovering. The RACE ACROSS EUROPE was certainly an experience and I think a fun one at that. I’ll do a full diary with ADDED BONUS GPS TRACKS once I get my act together and figure out how to spell.

In other news, my Eee turned up! In the end, I cancelled my amazon order because they were being stupidly slow. They pushed the date back a number of times, and I just got bored of waiting. Browsing around the internet, I stumbled upon Ebuyer, who excitingly told me that if I ordered in the next 4 hours, I could have it the day after. Add to that, they suggested the right memory upgrade and were cheaper than Amazon. So, I cancelled the previous order and re-bought from Ebuyer. Satisfyingly, it arrived the next day.

It’s amazing. It’s also tiny. The first thing I did was to wipe Xandros off and stick on Ubuntu. Thankfully, there are some guys over at Ubuntu Eee make a version of Ubuntu that comes with some Eee-friendly pre-configurations, such as making the font smaller and other niceties. However, it doesn’t include rather important things like the WLAN or LAN drivers, so you have to get these from somewhere else and move them over with a USB key. The screen’s small, but has 1024 pixels width, so sensible things fit on that. The keyboard is also rather small, but with a bit of practice, I can touchtype almost as well as on a fullsize version. My biggest annoyance at the moment is figuring out how to enable the palm detection for the mouse. The mouse area is quite big and as a result it’s very easy to accidentally tap the area with your palm as you type, leading to random other things on the screen being selected. I know that palm detection on these sorts of things is possible, it’s just a question of figuring out how. The physical mouse buttons are rather stiff, but they’ll loosen over time. I’ve not tried the bluetooth or the webcam yet, so there’s plenty to tweak with yet. All in all, a good purchase.