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Which Distro For an Eee PC?
An anonymous reader writes "I've got an Eee PC 1000HD, and frankly, I can't stand XP. I know it's odd, because I actually like Vista, but XP is such a giant piece of crap on here that I struggle to use it day-by-day. Anyway, my question is this: which Linux distro should I run on it? Plain Ubuntu just doesn't have driver support. I tried Ubuntu-eee, which, to put it bluntly, does not work for me at all (slow, terrible battery life, even worse interface). I've heard that Jaunty Jackalope is going to have better netbook support, but that's all the way in April! Is there a distro out now that will free me from XP's terribleness without being terrible itself?" Getting wireless working on an Eee PC (though in my experience imperfectly) with stock Ubuntu is possible; for me it took some googling, though I've been told with great enthusiasm that it actually works "out of the box." What distros are you running on your netbook, and what problems do you find?
Also there is EeeOS which claims to be:
EeeOS is designed to be a minimalistic Custom Debian Distribution that provides a base system (drivers, system tools, Xorg) and nothing more. The idea behind such a release is so that users of Eee Linux OS can configure and build their own Eee experience ... an EeeXperience if you will :P While systems like Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse and Xandros are all amazing in their own right, they often come pre-configured and with a lot of bloat. Some power users prefer to have complete control over their systems and it is with these users in mind that Eee OS was created.
I was going to go on a lengthy explanation about how you could use Slackware or Gentoo to provide the optimal configuration you are interested in but after reading your summary, I doubt you're interested in this sort of devotion to squeezing your eeePC like a lemon over your enemy's eye.
Ubuntu has worked "out of the box" for two of my DLink WiFi cards. It worked on a no name CompUSA brand rebate PCMCIA card on my laptop but there were ... annoyances ... with lack of encryption options.
... which I guess would be more widely supported?
Also, why did you go with an Eee Ubuntu and not Xubuntu
My work here is dung.
You may wish to try http://www.eeebuntu.org/ which is NOT the same as Ubuntu-eee.
It has worked decently on my 1000HD.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
It really is.
Seconded.
I've been running Debian's Lenny release upon my Eee PC for the past few months. Everything works, from the power buttons, sound, video, camera, wireless.
The only instructions I used were those on the wiki you link to.
Still this question is going to receive the obvious replies - everybody will suggest the distribution they know and like the best (the two are often the same).
I'd say "try a few, choose your favourite", but I suspect the better thing to do would just be to pick what you're using elsewhere, or whatever local people are using. Then if you have problems you'll have people to ask.
It's like the event logs suddenly became human readable, the shell started to suck less, and a KDE-like start menu started letting me just type in what I want without navigating the typical Windows Start Menu hell. It's harder than you might think to go back to XP after a substantial period of time on an optimized Vista install.
Not that there's any way at all that I'll defend its astoundingly slow file transfers and deletion speeds, after a service-pack and years of patches. Still, it works well enough in-game and does have some strong points from an administrator's perspective, given modern hardware and well-written drivers. (Albeit not well enough to get me to use it more than 20% of the time.)
I'm the same, I've got Xubuntu and compiz running and it's perfect, get some minimal window decorations and you're sorted.
Just do a standard installation, then head over to http://www.array.org/ and follow the instructions to install the kernel which will get your wireless and hotkeys working.
http://www.eeeuser.com/ is an excellent forum if you have any more questions. There are a few threads there that have step by step guides to installing and configuring Xubuntu, but there really isn't much to it beyond getting a custom kernel.
I found stock Ubuntu Intrepid with a few tweaks to be easier to set up and more pain-free than any of the "easy/tuned" distros are. Once I had everything working (including wireless), I wrote up a HOWTO explaining how to go from bare metal to a fully working system so that others wouldn't have to go digging through a dozen forums to find the info. Check it out, might be all you need to get up and going.
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I bought a Eee, with Linux preinstalled to give to my wife for her birthday last week. The wifi didn't work. Called Asus tech support, and they figured out that the problem was that the machine had an RaLink wifi card, but the only one they had working drivers for was Atheros. They weren't able to offer any solution other than returning it, so I did.
Since they have RaLink on some of their machines, and they say they don't have working Linux drivers for RaLink, it sounds like some of the Windows versions have RaLink, and therefore the OP should check that before trying to switch to Linux.
If you look at the Amazon reviews for the model I bought, you'll see a lot of people complaining that they bought the Linux version, installed Windows, and then Windows didn't work right. On all of those, I clicked the "NO" link next to "Was this review helpful to you?," because that's just silly. If you want Windows, you buy the Windows version. Installing an OS on a desktop tends to be a hassle, doing it on a standard notebook has many more pitfalls, and doing it on a netbook is even more difficult to get right. It's pretty silly that these people are blaming Asus when essentially they just bought the wrong model.
The OP seems to be making the same mistake, but in reverse, which seems even less sensible to me. It means that MS is getting a Windows tax from him for an OS he doesn't like and isn't going to use. Great way to support an illegal monopoly when you didn't even have to, as well as creating huge hassles for yourself. My advice at this point would be either to return it if he can, or sell it on eBay, and then buy one with Linux preinstalled.
BTW, a little googling will show that a lot of people are receiving Eees with nonfunctional wifi. I'm really looking forward to the day when Linux-based desktop and laptop machines are so cheap and good that it puts MS out of business. Unfortunately, that day hasn't come yet. The quality just isn't there yet. I've bought PCs with Linux preinstalled from a variety of vendors (Great Quality, WalMart, Asus) over the last 5 years or so. The best that ever happened was that the hardware was fine but the version of Linux that came preinstalled (ThizLinux, gOS) was lousy, so I wiped the disk and installed something else (FreeBSD, Ubuntu). The worst that ever happened was this experience with the Eee.
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First off, I submitted this, my bad on forgetting to put in a name. The reason I can't use 7 is because the 1000HD graphics chipset doesn't support Aero, and using Vista/7 without Aero basically renders the OS useless (especially in the case of 7, where the vast majority of the new GUI features require Aero). I was trying to be concise in the submission so I didn't want to get off in a tangent about how pissed I am that Intel refuses to write WDDM drivers for the GMA 900.
On my eeePC 901, I'm using the standard Ubuntu 8.10 install and then using a wired connection I have installed Adamm's kernel which fixes all the hardware issues. The instructions are simple to follow and are available at http://array.org/ubuntu/ (if you can use apt-get you can follow these instructions).
Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
If you want an optimized system, Arch Linux is not more difficult than any other distro. You just don't have the choice to install a complete desktop system with lots and lots of things you don't want, configured in ways you don't like, so that you can uninstall almost everything and then install what you want, from obscure package repos, so you get library confusions etc, for then to reconfigure almost everything, so it works the way you like it to.
The Arch Linux installer lets you:
1. Install a very basic system
2. Configure the most important things in one simple configuration file (or a few more if you want or need to)
Then you boot into your basic system and:
1. Update your system with one command
2. Install the programs you need. The package manager will take care of all dependencies.
3. Configure them the way you want them
4. Enjoy!
Of course, I agree, this is more difficult than letting someone else make all the choices for you.
By the way, I use Arch Linux on a Eee 901, and it works perfectly. There are some tricks to speed it up. Mounting the /tmp and /var/log and /var/tmp as a ram disk makes it a lot more responsive. Turning off disk cache in firefox is also a good idea.
Driver support isn't a problem for me at least. Everything works. You might need to install a customized kernel package for the wireless card, but from 2.6.29 there will be support for the card in the kernel (This is for the 901, I don't know about the 1000HD).