I have not yet talked much about price. Is the EeePC1000HE good value for money?
Price is currently around £300. Anyone who has still got a 3 or 5 year old laptop may think that is amazing value for money. But plummeting hardware prices eventually reached laptops. There is now quite a range of laptops available under £300. I don’t mean netbooks, but full-fledged laptops. For example, Argos is currently advertising the Asus X58L for £280. It has a 15.4 inch, 1280 x 800px screen, Intel Celeron 2GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 120GB disk, optical drive, WiFi. In other words, the spec is similar to the EeePC1000HE except that the screen is bigger, and the battery life is worse (but you don’t have the Atom processor compromise).
Asus is just one of many vendors in the sub £300 segment, but the important point is that you should not be buying the EeePC1000HE simply on grounds of cost. You should only be buying it (1) battery life is important to you and you are prepared to accept the video/battery life trade off (the 1000HE uses a single Intel Atom processor which handles the video and there are plenty of reports about problems with video), (2) size/weight is important to you, and you are happy with the small screen height (600px).
At this point I think I should investigate the video problems for myself. So I go to youtube (on Firefox 3, running under Ubuntu Linux), but am immediately told I need the latest Flash driver from Adobe. I click to install that and am presented with a confusing menu of download choices. I guess which one I want and click to get it. After a few moments I get “Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libcurl3″. So it looks as though I first have to install libcurl3, whatever that may be. I google and get to his exchange on ubuntuforums.org:
I’m new to Linux; I just installed Ubuntu today, so I don’t know anything. Sorry if I’m asking a stupid question. What does “Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libcurl3″ mean?
I was trying to install Adobe Flash Player and that’s what came up.
What am I doing wrong?
Perfect, I think. Exactly my position. But my heart sinks when I see the reply:
Hi and welcome to the forum. What exactly did you do (i.e. commands, actions you took etc) before getting the error message?
You could try the instructions here (clickable) for installing flash and other plugins.
My previous Linux nightmares wash over me. I love these guys’ enthusiasm. But can’t they understand that I have nil interest in spending hours acquiring some ephemeral expertise about the inner workings of Linux?
Needless to say, clicking as invited brings up some academic gobbledegook about restricted formats. My eyes glaze. To get to the 3 lines of relevant information, it looks as though I will have to read a thousand words, then click on a few dozen further links, each leading further fascinating arcana, in which I HAVE NO INTEREST. In case you are wondering, the accompanying screenshot is more than 600px high, so I had to take it on a different machine.
To be fair the experts on ubuntuforums.org (who are providing their services free) are less demanding than the ones I remember years ago. The original enquirer does what is suggested but it doesn’t work:
… I got a different error. I downloaded the plugin and clicked “Install Package” and then it says “could not download all required files” and the details say “Failed to lock /var/cache/apt/archives/lock”. What’s going on?
ibutho, who has rather a charming avatar, and is evidently a four-coffee expert, gives a helpful reply:
This happens when trying to use another package manager (gdebi apt-get, synaptic. update-manager) while one is already open. You can only have one one running at a time.
Except that I know nothing about package managers, certainly not which one I have installed at the moment. Another article beckons.
