The Asus EEE is an excellent machine (although I don't think the technology has arrived until these things last at least six hours, it currently is about 3-3.5). It has tcl already installed on it (8.4.9) but not Tk although that can be added with apt-get. If you add gcc and the other build tools you can compile the latest 8.5.2b from CVS. It didn't recognize freetype so the fonts were limited and ugly. However, after adding the following packages it recognized freetype and now looks good.
I've also built an extension to use flite, the CMU text to speech synthesizer. VPT
CGM Simpler just to get ActiveTcl though, that's what I did for my "mini-me" PC.
LV 2008 Mar 18 I am curious about the impact on disk space of adding stuff either via apt-get or the activetcl mechaism. I've read reviews in which it was said that once a package has been added, it can't be removed - or at least, if "removed", the disk space isn't reclaimed, due to the type of filesystem chosen. Given that many of the libraries like freetype, etc. are large, how quickly does it look like you'll run out of usable space on the system?
Or is all that stuff just FUD?
CGM The preinstalled software is on a read-only partition, with writeable one overlaid on top, so you can "delete" preinstalled files but you don't get back the disk space and they will reappear if you do a reset to factory default state. It's possible to reformat the flash drive to get round this if you want to live dangerously. But anything newly-installed will be in the writeable partition and so can be deleted again. Lots of good info can be found at http://wiki.eeeuser.com/
LV Okay, so that makes sense. I wonder, in the future as the vendor releases updates, if they have a mechanism to update the "read only" area. I have seen an article or two about replacing their version of Linux with a more standard version. It surely would be nice if the Puppy Linux folk and the various UMPC variations could work together, saving disk space by using tclkit based starkits!
Martyn Smith I tried a couple of my starpack wrapped (8.4.9 I think) executables on my sons EEEPC and they worked correctly (except for the screen size, need to rework for smaller buttons) so that is another possibility, If I get a chance I will try a 8.5.x starpack and see how that looks.