The advice on this page is assuming you're still using the default Xandros software, or have modified it to “advanced mode” (KDE). This HOWTO tells you how to install - you'll have to use the docs, Help, and maybe the Internet to find out how to use the tools.
Both “Easy” and “Advanced” mode will work fine.
You'll be pleased to know that the Eee makes a superb portable solution for:
1) backing up your photo files when your camera (card) fills up
2) previewing your photos with a much better screen than your camera's LCD
3) doing post-processing (cropping, white balance correction, in fact pretty well anything) in the field.
Depending on whether you use Easy or Advanced mode, you might like to add the commands for the tools to menus after you have installed them; they are quite simple:
gimp
and
ufraw
Using my kitchen scales, I get:
Eee PC with battery and power supply - 1128 grams Freecom 160GB Hard drive + cable - 324 grams Multi Card Reader and cable - 82 grams "Ring" trackball "mouse" and cable - 88 grams
for a total of 1622 grams - a nice portable kit for a total cost of around £320. Consider that the Eee gives you a 7” screen compared with dedicated photo viewers at a similar or higher price -
Model Price Capacity Screen Weight
Epson P5000 £450 80GB 4" 430 g. (Both these weights are bare unit without a power
Vosonic VP8360 £320 160GB 3.6" 240 g. supply; probably need to add minimum of 250g
for accessories. )
- and the Eee gives full photo editing (and a laptop equivalent). I haven't done a side-by-side comparison of the screen quality, but the Eee screen is pin-sharp and to my eye colour rendition is excellent. Case pretty well closed.
This lets you free up your camera storage, take backups, and preview your photos in an Image Viewer.
If you have problems with using USB devices and SD cards under advanced mode, see the section How to switch to full desktop mode (KDE). I've gone back to using “Easy” mode, because it does everything I need and runs just that little bit faster.
My camera uses CF cards anyway, so I need to transfer directly via USB, via a USB Card Reader, or by using a USB key or similar device. Since my camera uses CF cards, and I've lost the mini-USB connector for direct connection, I use a USB Card Reader.
A USB Card reader is a credit-card-sized device that plugs into a USB port on the Eee - you can get them from any PC shop or via the web for around £10 to £15. Most of the newer ones will accept any kind of storage card.
Plug the Card reader into the Eee, plug your camera's card into the Reader, and in a few seconds the files on the card will be available to the Eee. The same should happen if you have a direct USB connection from your camera to a USB plug - the camera usually pretends to be a mass storage device. If your camera is an oddball, use the Card Reader method (or you may have a menu option somewhere on your camera to tell it to behave as a mass storage device).
I would suggest you copy files from the camera card to either your Eee storage or another device (I use a Freecom 2.5” 160GB USB Hard Drive for this purpose) to work on, and not to save the results of editing or whatever on your camera card. Doing things this way means you keep as much space free on your shooting card as possible, and that you have a backup of any photos transferred. In my case, a half a gigabyte of files transfer from the CF card to the Freecom drive in around 20 seconds - much faster than on my desktop machine!
The Gimp is the Open Source image manipulation tool. You can use it to do virtually any kind of post-processing you want, except RAW file manipulation - for that you'll need other tools (see below).
Follow this guide this guide for instructions on installing The GIMP.
I use UFRAW to do RAW post-processing like white balance correction, and to convert RAW photo files to JPEG. This tool is based on DCRAW, and uses that as its engine internally.
It's a bit more involved to install this, as it has to be compiled from source for the Eee.
First of all, you have to install the compiler and compiler tools. Take a look at Install Development Tools and follow the instructions there.
You need also to install some pre-requisite software:
apt-get update (if you haven't done it yet) apt-get install pkg-config libgtk2.0-dev liblcms1-dev libgimp2.0-dev libjpeg62-dev libtiff4-dev
Some of these may not be available from the Xandros repositories, so you might have to add a debian repository for the odd one (if you do, see, for example, Setting up and using Wine which includes instructions how to do this). If you do, when you've downloaded this lot, remove the debian repository from your sources.list file.
Then you need to download the UFRAW source code. Download the debian package from the webpage http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html
Unpack it to a suitable subdirectory in your user space, and open a terminal and switch to that subdirectory. Issue the command:
./configure --enable-extras
(See the README file for what –enable-extras does.)
If all is well, the command:
sudo make install
should compile and install UFRAW.
If you have the Gimp, you will now find that attempting to open RAW files with the Gimp brings up a plugin with the same interface as UFRAW to convert the RAW file to a format the the Gimp can handle. Remember that RAW files have more colour levels and that levels and other information will be lost in the conversion, so I'd recommend that you keep the original RAW file as well as the results of any conversion or modification, so you can always go back to the original.
If you want to do it outside the Gimp,
ufraw
will start the UFRAW GUI tool and open the dialog to select your first RAW file.
The writer of UFRAW took the decision that the operating window shouldn't scroll. This means that you'll have to collapse the Histogram displays to get at the Save and Cancel buttons and a few “Advanced” options, unless you use the trick of clicking and dragging with the left mouse button on any part of the window while holding down the ALT key. You'll also find that clicking on the little triangle at the extreme right of the toolbar (in both Easy and Advanced mode) to hide the toolbar and give you that little bit more display area helps. (A little triangle in a square is left for you to re-show the toolbar.)
Or maybe you feel up to amending the code to make it more Eee friendly. 
Doing the above installation of UFRAW also creates DCRAW, the basic command-line tool which does the actual work. This is invoked by the command
dcraw
in a terminal - actually, that won't do much, as you have to specify what you want it to do with command arguments. Many people prefer to do this, as you actually get better control over what's going on, and you can set up batch scripts to do many shots at a time instead of having to manipulate them individually.
For a good tutorial on how to start using dcraw, see http://www.guillermoluijk.com/tutorial/dcraw/index_en.htm
The following resources document the experience of actually using the Eee PC as part of a photographer's toolkit.
