I've installed an alternative graphics driver called "Astray", which downscales higher resolutions like 1024*768 to the native resolution 800*480. Installation is very easy, and the tool works pretty well. From the taskbar you can choose the resolution, enable or disable downscaling or define standard resolution modes for specific software.chrisby wrote:... Have you tried that and if so is it pretty livable? Any downsides to setting it up that way? ...
Downside 1: Eats quite some cpu when processing higher resolutions. Screen becomes a little laggy
Downside 2: The vga output doesnt scale correctly anymore when you connect a 2nd display. the ext display always runs in 800*480, scrolling enabled when switching to higher resolutions. Could not make up a workaround for this...
Since i dont really need the vga output atm i can live with that perfectly. You just have to work around things at times.
Infos on "Astray" : http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=18260&p=1
But then I played with it a little, and understood that 7" screen is not enough for serious work. Yep, you can read and write emails, watch something on Youtube, but for anything else you need to scroll the screen all the time, and I didn't like it. I decided to wait for 900 version with 9" screen, now it's here, and I even had a chance to lend it for some time without buying to test it. So here we go.
I've installed Wine and wineasio, but then I recognized that I can't install realtime Linux kernel (to lower overall latency), because a few eeePC Linux hacks that I've downloaded previously can't be compiled for rt kernel. For example, I wasn't able to compile WiFi drivers under rt kernel. Maybe it's an user error, but I don't know how to solve it anyway. Back to the story: I was extremly surprised that I can reach very low latency even with a standart linux kernel, about a 7 ms. CPU usage is pretty high in this case, so I decided to use a bit higher latency. There are two popular windows VST hosts that works under Wine. It's Reaper and Energy XT 2. I don't own Reaper, but I've downloaded evaluation version and installed it under Wine. Everything was ok! It was working great on eeePC 900 in Ubuntu, but in my opinion 9" screen is not very good in this case. Reaper a "mature" software now, and there's a lot of details in interface that was hard to work with (but for experienced Reaper user it may be ok). Anyway I've unistalled Reaper and installed XT2 instead (which I own by the way). XT2 was easier on eye in my opinion, I've dowloaded a few VST freebies, installed them, and was able to create a simple electronic tune right in a minutes.