ASUS 1015E-DS03 10.1-Inch Laptop ( Black )

Amazing notebook for under $250, fast shipping from Amazon. I've had it for a week and it has performed flawlessly for what my wife and I use it for. We wanted a

small notebook that can be easily carried around the house, as well as taking on trips. It's great for web browsing, watching youtube videos(search ubuntu-restricted-extras), typing documents using libreoffice, etc. Battery lasts 4.5-6 hours or so, depending on usage.

It comes with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit, which is supported through April 2017. The initial configuration takes approximately 10 minutes before booting into the OS,

which then required 430 MB of updates. The notebook uses efi boot with gpt partitioning. Here's the partitioning:

1. 100 MB fat32 boot-efi

2. 4 GB fat32 PQServices restore

3. 179 GB ext4 Ubuntu OS

4. 7.5 GB swap

5. 108 GB ntfs data

You can boot from usb flash by pressing the "Esc" key at the Asus screen during boot. According to a reviewer of the Asus X201E-DH01, the recovery partition can be

accessed by pressing "shift" at boot. It comes with bios ver. 3.2, the latest is 3.4, which can be downloaded from Asus support. I wouldn't recommend updating the

bios unless you know what you're doing.

I'm an experienced Ubuntu user, so didn't have any problems setting everything up. For someone with little or no experience, there's tons of online help, especially

ubuntuforums.org. The unity launcher takes a little getting used to, and I recommend going into System Settings--->Appearance--->Behaviour and setting the launcher

to auto-hide and moving the sensitivity to high. This will free up much needed screen space. I've installed cairo dock, which really isn't needed, but some might

prefer it over unity's launcher.

Ubuntu isn't for everyone, but the good thing is it can be tested by downloading the Ubuntu 12.04.2 iso, burning it as an image to cd or dvd. The live cd(which is

much slower than an install) will give you the Ubuntu experience, without actually installing it on your present computer.

Once Ubuntu is set up & personalized on the notebook, there should be little or no configuring required. I would highly recommend the ASUS 1015E-DS03 to anyone who is familiar with Ubuntu or is willing to put in a little effort to learn a new OS(Windows was new at one time).

I'm an old timer(65 year old "cooter") so anyone can learn to use Ubuntu, it's been a rewarding experience for me(and my wife).

Just wanted to add that everything worked out-of-the-box; however I haven't tried ethernet, but wireless is fast & reliable. The notebook quickly suspends when

the lid is closed and immediately resumes when opened. I did have one time that it didn't suspend(you'll know this if the wireless light remains on), only the

power light blinks if it suspends properly. The battery discharged completely when it didn't suspend, so I later went into System Settings--->Power--->Turn off

power when battery is critically low, to prevent this.

I don't want this to be an Ubuntu help review, but here's a few other tweaks that I did. In Firefox, to enable click to select all in the address bar: Type "about-config"(without quotes) into the address bar, type "browser.urlbar.ClickSelectsAll", toggle from false to true.

To adjust fonts & various other tweaks, search for "ubuntu-tweak" online, the directions will require using the command line or terminal(press the "Windows" key,type

"terminal" in the search box, copy & paste one line at a time, press "enter" after each line. In ubuntu-tweak, you might also want to change to a more traditional

scrollbar by disabling overlay scrollbar. Don't let using the terminal(it's easy) deter you from using Ubuntu, this should be the last time you'll use it.

Note, pressing the "Windows" key opens the Dash menu, where you can find all the programs installed on the computer. This paragraph isn't an actual review of the

notebook, but maybe it'll help get anyone started who is unfamiliar with Ubuntu Linux.

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