SU on Notebook
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Got my eee...wheeeeeeeeeeeeee. I'm posting from it now...tomorrow, the tampering begins!
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Search on youtube for the touch screen mod by "dae_ja_voo".
+++ EDIT +++
nevermind, I found it for you, a quick how-to can be found here.
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@unknownuser said:
Search on youtube for the touch screen mod by "dae_ja_voo".
Thanks, Julian.
That sort of thing is why I wanted one of these little beasts...I think I may be making some modifications to it's internal storage system first, though. I was looking at vacuum-forming a new shell with enough room to fit a small harddrive into it. I bought the 120GB drive on sale with the eee, so I can easily test out the functionality.
Or I can just Dremel a hole in the existing shell and duck-tape the drive to some part of it where the ventilation isn't too bad. That's more my style! I always like my hardware to look like something I(or Han Solo) might find tossed in a corner of the Millennium Falcon with some old rags.
Actually, first thing is to tweak up the operating system(s) and get a CAD program and SketchUp going...
Oh damn, I have to do some work today, too...I wonder if anyone will give me a grant to tamper with an eee all day long?
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By the way on the Eee 8G I can run SU 6 Pro with Fast Feedback (despite a warning from SketchUp that it might not work) and Hardware Acceleration, with only slightly worse performance than I get on my aging Dell 5150 notebook (which also has a gig of RAM and a 128 MB Nvidia card). In other words, a 13 MB skp file will bog the Eee down a bit, but not unreasonably so.
I've set it up so that I've got Firefox, SU6, Rhino 4 (for CAD and modeling, if SU ever fails...Rhino has a much lower graphics card requirement), Abiword (a light Open Source word processor), Blender 2.45, and Photoshop 7 on XP SP 2. If I need a spreadsheet or presentation software Google Docs will do (I'm becoming more impressed with that all the time, anyway), and I use a webmail client for email. With Windows virtual mememory requirements, all this is consuming about 3 GB of the 8 GB SSD harddrive, but I've been supplementing it with a 4G SDHC card in the card slot and I've just ordered a new 8GB card to double that (and I could recover some space on the internal disk if I was willing to ditch Rhino's Explicit History plugin, which needs .NET 2.0).
The only program that is giving me any problems on the Eee, incidentally, is Acrobat Reader, which is such a worthless beast that I'd love to ditch it and probably will if I can find a lighter pdf reader.
The Eee, incidentally, doesn't have a CD/DVD drive, of course, but it only took about forty dollars to get a cheap Pioneer drive and an USB 2.0 case (absurdly twice as big as the Eee) that the computer recognized instantly. Actually, it recognized everything instantly.
It's just great as something I can carry around and do a little work with...and I haven't even started to overclock or otherwise tamper significantly, besides making some space-saving changes to XP. Incidentally, if I didn't need SU or Rhino and could get by with just QCAD, the Ubuntu-derivative ("eeeXubuntu") available for this thing was amazingly elegant (I tried it out for an afternoon before I installed XP).
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Lewis that is fantastic! Now I know can SU work well on the eee I'm getting one. At the moment I have a nasty 2 hour commute 3 days a week and my Toshiba Satellite 17" laptop makes it much worse. What Cad program are you going for?
Have you tried LiteCad? It's a tiny Acad clone. -
@unknownuser said:
Lewis that is fantastic! Now I know can SU work well on the eee I'm getting one. At the moment I have a nasty 2 hour commute 3 days a week and my Toshiba Satellite 17" laptop makes it much worse. What Cad program are you going for?
Have you tried LiteCad? It's a tiny Acad clone.In my own little practice, I use Rhino as both a NURBS modeler and a 2D CAD program (it reads and writes ACAD files and even will find the XREFs!), so I'm set there. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Be sure, before you get one of these, Jon, that you're comfortable with the keyboard. A friend of mine with very large hands tried to use mine the other night, and he had difficulty not hitting two keys at once.
Now that I'm sure that everything is installed properly and gmail is forwarding my business email account to me, I was planning on putting this thing through its paces today...I'm still quite surprised that the integrated video is working with SU...that's not supposed to be possible.
I need to go find a Starbucks table to monopolize somewhere, like a good little yuppie....
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Hmmm...just a quick "SU on Eee" note:
I was just reviewing a SU file a student sent me this morning, and while making corrections I noticed that the eraser tool didn't immediately visibly erase lines...if I move the camera, the erased lines vanished, but not before then. This error stopped if I turn off Hardware Acceleration.
Hi Ho. I was wondering if something quirky like this was going to happen.
EDIT: on further exploration, it's Fast Feedback that is causing that bug, but only if it is turned on with Hardware Acceleration. HA by itself is fine.
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http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9912854-7.html?tag=
Someone else noticed the problem with the Eee keyboard. Well, whatever...there's always something better coming out next week...
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@unknownuser said:
I need to go find a Starbucks table to monopolize somewhere, like a good little yuppie
Trains are best - free electricity, comfy seats, a range of refreshments and an ever changing view from the window
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You have to have a reason to be on a train...
But in any case, I have been having a blast with my Eee. I had it on a potential job site the other day...building an existing conditions model in SketchUp for a renovation project. And for some reason, after many years of avoiding it I have a sudden urge thanks to my Eee to write code...so I have Java, Processing, Python, and FreeBasic installed on it now. I have this notion of writing my own quirky CAD-type app (I prefer to think of it as a "Gonzo-Design Program" or GDP).
I will be buying that 9-inch monitor version (which includes a faster Intel processor, supposedly) when it arrives (if) late in the fall. I recently read that the popularity of this computer model is such that not only is MS extending the availability of XP for it into 2010 but that Asus has talked them into creating a customized XP version. I do like the Linux 'buntu available for this, but as long as I can't get SU or Rhino or the equivalent for some distro I'm happy to continue on a flavor of XP.
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Sounds like your having fin with your (p)eee, im tempted to get one for working on, but im having trouble justifying it to myself, especially cause im skint
p.s. sorry aobut the extreemly bad joke, i couldnt help it
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I had a look at the Eee and now scratching my head wondering why? It is so small, using it for SU would be so frustrating due the screen size not to mention if the model one was building/ presenting was anything more than an isolated component which heaven forbid had some texturing the Eee would buckle and die. To me it is as pointless as watching a movie on your cellphone.
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I have no difficulty using SU on my Eee, except that it doesn't like it when Rhino and SU are both open at the same time for some reason. I don't use toolbars with either program at all, and I do have a Microsoft USB mouse attached since I've never liked touchpads for modeling.
I think of the Eee as a sketchpad. If I need a bigger screen for bigger things, I have two quad-core workstations sitting in my office with 24-inch LCD screens. But I'm not always there, and I can't carry mini-towers with me, whereas the Eee and similar devices are less heavy than some paperbacks I have been known to cart about. Actually, the Eee is the same size as the standard paper sketchbook brand I like.
Off to a jobsite now...with both my sketchbooks (Eee and paper) in an old ammo bag.
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Ooooooh! Shiny!
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lust lust lust im nigh on entirely convinced that i need one of these now, sounds like the shiz, and im onyl half way through that review
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Solo,
I know where you are coming from, there is more power out there. But the eee is a very affordable option if you need to work mobile.
Lewis wrote
@unknownuser said:
I do like the Linux 'buntu available for this, but as long as I can't get SU or Rhino or the equivalent for some distro I'm happy
I don't think Google will ever release a linux SU version as they seem to be moving towards online applications such as Google docs, so they aren't primarily interested in the future of desktop operating systems. Personally I think this is a shame as XP is a bit bloated for a device like the eee. Have you looked at AdvoCADo (link to it on the freeware board)? It is clearly a linux attempt at an SU-type modelling tool but it isn't a useable app yet. The demo is interesting though.
@unknownuser said:
I have this notion of writing my own quirky CAD-type app (I prefer to think of it as a "Gonzo-Design Program" or GDP).
Very very interesting idea! I'm not a programmer but if there is anyway I can help at all let me know, for instance I know of quite a few open source design software advocates/eggheads. The open source CAD project website (link to it on freeware board) would be a good starting point.
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Jon,
Interestingly enough (and I'm hardly a big fan of XP), the leaned-down version of the OS (made with nLite) takes up about half a gig lesson the Eee than the bespoke Xubuntu version. I suspect that I could do something about that if I was willing to kill off the Linux swap partition (there is page after page on the Eee forums about tweaking this sort of thing). But the Xubuntu is snappier in most respects, even if it won't recognize the USB camera.
I do have AvoCADo bookmarked...I'll check it out again.
You are correct about SU on Linux...I spoke with people in Boulder about it and they said they didn't have the manpower. I would actually like to see a Google Docs online CAD/modeler one day, though! I already use the other Docs applications regularly.
Getting back to the Eee, though, I am finding that it is a nice little platform for coding...Java, in my case. using the Processing extension. I can sit at any table and just hack away, with wireless and the open-source media player VLC supplying the streaming industrial rock...and caffeine the inspiration. Perhaps the Java coding stuff will lead to something. Art of Illusion is entirely written in Java and has some nice capabilities.
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