Summary
Last week my MacBook died of a premature death at age 2. Out of necessity, I have been forced to borrow my wife's EeePC for a while and to use it as my main development platform. The unexpected thing is that it just works perfectly.

So far I have been using my wife's EeePC as my main platform for four or five days. I have installed on it a lot of software I use for writing my articles, including

• emacs
• latex
• python2.5
• python2.6
• python3.0
• numpy & matplotlib
• sphinx
• sqlite
• postgresql
• PLT scheme
• Chicken scheme
• Ikarus Scheme
• Larceny Scheme
• Ypsilon Scheme

and many any other things. I have compiled from source most stuff, without any issue.

Right now I am preparing my talk for the Italian PyCon, when I want to demonstrate, running live from the EeePC, matplotlib and sphinx.

What can I say? The EeePC is not fast as the MacBook, but perfectly usable anyway, and everything works. I did try to use my old Compaq laptop first, but I could not use Ikarus on it, because its Athlon process was too old and had no support for the SSE3 instructions required by Ikarus. The EeePC instead works just fine and it actually much faster than the old laptop (FWIW, compiling Larceny took less than half the time) which costed something like 1500 Euros.

Now I am thinking if it makes sense for me to buy another "serious" laptop and to spend something like 800 Euros or if I can just buy another netbook for 300 Euros and be done with it.

The netbooks have really revolutioned the market and they are certainly not good only for surfing the Internet.

Talk Back!

Have an opinion? Readers have already posted 8 comments about this weblog entry. Why not add yours?

RSS Feed

If you'd like to be notified whenever Michele Simionato adds a new entry to his weblog, subscribe to his RSS feed.

Digg | del.icio.us | Reddit

About the Blogger

Michele Simionato started his career as a Theoretical Physicist, working in Italy, France and the U.S. He turned to programming in 2003; since then he has been working professionally as a Python developer and now he lives in Milan, Italy. Michele is well known in the Python community for his posts in the newsgroup(s), his articles and his Open Source libraries and recipes. His interests include object oriented programming, functional programming, and in general programming metodologies that enable us to manage the complexity of modern software developement.