If you’re a geek and you’re looking for a small netbook for traveling, here is my favorite: I’ve recently bought an Asus EEE PC 900A on Amazon for 278 euros including shipping. And no, I’m not going to post any affiliate links here.

What I like about my new toy is it’s size: Here you can see that it’s less than half of the size of my old 15.4-inch laptop:

I chose the Linux version because I don’t need Windows for surfing on the web or writing a few documents. I’ve played with Ubuntu for a long time now and absolutely love it. Also I’m in process of getting rid of Windows completely. More on that in a future post.

The pre-installed Xandros Linux sucks. It’s actually capable of doing a lot for you. But the user interface is really for dummies. It took me two minutes to realize that I had to kill it. I downloaded the newest Ubuntu on my USB memory stick and put it on the EEE. The netbook has 1 GB of RAM and an 8 GB solid state disk, something like an internal USB stick. These days you don’t really need more than this to do online work.

I had to connect the EEE PC to my LAN so that it could download a bunch of updates which also got my wireless internet connection working. So within half an hour I had a full Ubuntu Linux netbook. Here is a screenshot (literally) showing Gnome and Firefox: