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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.
Ubuntu makes a nice EEE distro.
But since you like Vista there may be nothing we can do.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
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
Powerful. Free.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC
Works out-of-the-box on my 701eeepc
For what it's worth, I've been running Xubuntu on my Eee ever since I got it. 100% happy with it, and used it to develop a little control panel for my Eee PC using Anjuta.
http://chronogears.com/2008/04/control-panel-for-eee-pc.html
J-F
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
It really is.
If you're struggling to use Windows XP on a daily basis, perhaps you should try something like this laptop. I'm certain you will find yourself struggling just as much and see just as much bloat with any kind of GNU/Linux distribution, so this can really cut down on the learning curve and usability issues.
If you like vista why not stick windows 7 on it?
What about the Eee 1000HA had hardware driver support issues?
The Intel Atom restricts the platform enough that there's very little hardware variance between units. WiFi and card readers are about the only thing that varies. I know the Atheros WiFi chipset used in the Aspire One series has some issues with "out of the box" Ubuntu support, but if you connect once via wired Ethernet you can apt-get a package that includes drivers that work. See the ath5k entry in the release notes - http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810
The only hardware issues I've had with my Acer Aspire One and vanilla Ubuntu were:
1) The above wifi issue
2) Kubuntu's initial Bluetooth issues, this was resolved in the latest round of KDE updates. (This was with a third-party BT dongle, and KDE Bluetooth support was entirely broken on all systems with recent kernels.)
3) Um... I think that's it?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I run eeebuntu on an Eee PC 900. Most of it is ok, though I had to do a bunch of command-line and config-file magic to make wifi and the touchpad work.
Wifi is now stable, but the touchpad forgets its settings every time I log out, so I have to reset it all the time. Rather annoying.
I would say that at the moment there isn't an OS out there that lends itself to the particular brand of configuration required for the netbooks, but if you wait just a bit longer it'll be worth the wait.
Aside from Windows 7's support for netbooks, the ext4 file system to be used with "Jaunty" will help with all the things you've complained about with Ubuntu as well as helping with boot time.
"As computers become faster in general and specifically Linux becomes used more for mission critical applications, the granularity of second-based timestamps becomes insufficient. To solve this, ext4 will have timestamps measured in nanoseconds. This feature is currently implemented in 2.6.23. In addition, 2 bits of the expanded timestamp field are added to the most significant bits of the seconds field of the timestamps to defer the year 2038 problem for an additional 500 years.
Support for date-created timestamps was added in ext4. However, as Theodore Ts'o points out, while adding an extra creation date field in the inode is easy (thus technically enabling support for date-created timestamps in ext4), modifying or adding the necessary system calls, like stat() (which would probably require a new version), and the various libraries that depend on them (like glibc) is not trivial and would require the coordination of many different projects[8]. So even if ext4 developers implement initial support for creation-date timestamps, this feature will not be available to user programs for now."
So far I have tried the following operating systems in this order:
vLited Vista Home
Ubuntu eee
eeebuntu Standard
nLited XP
eeebuntu NetBookRemix.
Just last night I switched back from XP to eeebuntu 2.0 NBR. Why? Well, it just works beautifully OOTB with my 701SD and the GUI works well with the 7" screen. All I had to do was edit my fstab to automatically mount my Airdisk and media shares on my Vista box and that was that. I use it to browse the web, edit/view spreadsheets and to remote into some of my home computers. ZSNES is also a crucial download.
I honestly don't really notice the battery drain. If I want to compute for 2+ hours, I will use my desktop to avoid sore wrists by using the 701SD's small keyboard.
You like Vista, but dislike XP?
What's it like in your parallel universe? Can I visit?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I would use Ubuntu on EeePC as it can REALLY be trimmed down, well, at least in theory.
Here's my dream OS configuration for EeePC.
(a) Enough computing power to do things efficiently. /usr or /usr/local with a partition on the USB drive so that it includes "all" the programs you want.
(b) Operate in two modes seamlessly:
(1) Portable "netbook" mode.
(2) Tethered mode, where you attach a USB keyboard and disk and a monitor, and it works like a full fledged desktop. Correctly detects the USB drive and replaces
I can't take seriously someone who claims he loves Vista AND considers XP to be crap.
I can kinda, sorta understood someone liking Vista's pretty new interface, but I've been using XP for 7 years now, and it's far from being crap. It's the most stable OS I've ever used, second only to the Mac OS. Vista on the other hand..... I can't even get it to play video on cnn.com or foxnews.com. It's not the worst OS I've ever used (Windows 3 was worse), but it's still pretty sad.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I don't know how transferable it is, but I purchased an Asus Aspire ONE for my better half at xmas and it came with a Linpus Distro which is a Netbook OS based on Fedora 8. Out of the bag it's a little locked down but after a few minutes of searching you can unlock the desktop and get an XFCE window manager and package-installer. Support for drivers is great - but then you'd expect that since it was the original OS that came with the Netbook.
It is not immoral to create the human species - with or without ceremony, Samuel Clemens.
I have a Dell Mini 9 that I run stock Ubuntu 8.10 + the Netbook Remix interface on and love it. There is a good 3-4GB left on the 8GB SSD even with OpenOffice 3 and a few other bigger apps.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
All the drivers for netbook hardware out of the box, two choices for the interface, and runs pretty darned will in 512 MB of memory.
I have it running on a Dell Mini 9 which is fairly similar to the eee.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UNR
My Babylon
But I can't take seriously someone who wants to watch videos on foxnews.com.
Hi!
I was considering buying one and putting OpenSuSE on it. There's a walkthrough on the OpenSuSE website:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_on_the_EeePC
Good Luck!
(Anonymous Coward) ;-)
Well if you feel like compiling from source, a guy here; http://forums.lunar-linux.org/viewtopic.php?t=535 put Lunar-Linux on his with minimal issues.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
At present my 701 uses eeeXubuntu. Which is fine save for WPA2 which I am having soem problems with, but you should get better quality adive there than from the bearpit that is Slashdot
Ubuntu 8.10 + array.org kernel is just fine.
At least on eee pc 900 you still need to use ndiswrapper for wlan - even if it would appear that the native drivers work, they don't. The connection is slower and breaks easier with them.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I have the newer Asus eee 900A model running Ubuntu 8.04, no issues at all to speak of; if you can use the Google getting all the tips/tweaks to get it properly installed/running/tuned is no big whoop. Also, you should be able to find a backup .ISO for the Xandros distro available on the web, I personally can't stand it, but it might suit you better....
Ok I have an AA1 rather than an eee pc, but Easy Peasy works fine(I did an update and the issues it did have went).
I've been running Zenwalk on my EEE 901 for months now and haven't had much trouble. I wouldn't suggest it for people who like everything working out of the box, since I had to install both wifi and eth drivers on my own, so you don't have any connectivity in the beginning. You should definitely try the OS you're considering on a virtual machine first, just to be sure that you like it. Also, whichever distro you choose, you'll have to do your homework first ;)
I've got Ubuntu running just fine on my Eee 901 using NDISWrapper. Go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/ and download the following onto a flash drive (you'll get them with the .deb extension upon clicking the link for your architecture--i386):
.deb files in the order that I mentioned them above. Now you'll have a "Windows Wireless Drivers" item in your System/Administration menu. Open it and feed it the .inf and .sys files from your windows wifi drivers.
From the Misc category: ndiswrapper-common and ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
From the Network category: ndisgtk
Put your flash drive into your Ubuntu Eee. Double click the
i've tried xandros->eeebuntu->ubuntu->debian (which worked well OOTB) now i'm on cruncheee, which also works well out of the box on my eee 701, except i experience the same firefox lag that i also experienced with ubuntu. (debian didn't noticeably have this problem but i wanted to try openbox and cruncheee was just a iso file away -home dir on my SD card.)
My hp2133 runs Ubuntu 8.10, just fine. Video drivers make the process slightly ragged getting the OS on the unit, but once thats done, its smooth sailing. Ubuntu had the most hardware support for netbooks of the distros i looked into.
Windows 7. I'm sure it would rate the performance of your EEE PC in the 3.5 range.
I think I speak for all of slashdot when I say this.
No, you really don't. You just speak for judgmental, obnoxious pricks that believe the world should operate only according to their narrow-minded rules. People like you are the reason linux only enjoys a 1.2% marketshare.
A lot of us actually would like to see better market penetration and a system that is universally accessible and enjoyed by users of all proficiency levels. This is a requirement for the big software houses to want to port their products to *nix.
I use plain Debian (Lenny) on my eee 901. Most things work out-the-box and for the things that don't there is a eee Repo.
The things I needed to install from the eee Repo were the wireless drivers (rt2860) and the acpi-scripts.
I personally much prefer using a mainstream distro instead of a small(er) project that might disappear one day.
I've been using Slackware 12.1 on my 900A Eee PC for a while now. Before that, I was using it on a 701. In both cases, it worked really well and was very responsive (I chose to use Xfce as my desktop environment since I wasn't that familiar with Fluxbox at the time). I've even done some Common Lisp programming on them with a locally compiled SBCL. One thing I noticed in particular was that I got more free space out of my 4gb SSD than with Ubuntu-Eee or the default Xandros-based distro. Slackware 12.2 should actually work out of the box. 12.1 required a modified kernel and a few other things (packages at http://slackeee.strangled.net/). The only thing to keep in mind is that I do a lot of things by hand on my boxen, such as set up wifi connections on the command line, so Slackware may not be the best choice for you if you're not used to this sort of thing. I did a short writeup on installing onto my 701 on my blog, as well: http://blog.partition36.com/2008/07/04/eee-pc-meet-slackware/
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" --Seymour Cray
I have a eee 900 with XP pro. I run world of warcraft, SQL server, and visual studio on it. (did upgrade to 2gb ram).
Never had a problem with anything, but that's also due to understanding what it can and cannot do on such limited hardware.
I do really like it, although I've got my eyes on the N10 model now...
I have a MSI wind and installed Mandriva 2009.0 and everything worked from the start. The hardware on the wind is almost the same as the eePC, and Mandriva was designed with netbooks in mind.
I've been using Debian Lenny on eee 1000 for about 6 months now. Works good for me. After installing from the OS from the DebianEeePC link above, then install wicd from here. The wicd made my debian eee pc much more enjoyable. http://wicd.sourceforge.net/download.php ##### Too bad Tim didn't buy the linux version of the eee PC, even though you pay the same price for the windows version, you pay the microsoft tax in the form of a smaller harddrive. Still, better late than never.
I have one of the original EEE PC 701 models and I put Mandriva 2008.1 and KDE onto the 4GB SSD. Web cam, wireless, everything works. I haven't even used the 4GB SDHC card yet. Mandriva + the EEE makes for a very nice and powerful, yet portable package for light surfing, emails and SSH connections to the home net. Skid
I'm using Fedora 9 on my (old, I know) dell inspirion 5100. All the devices are supported, but the wireless did take an hour or two to set up using ndiswrapper. Although, I take that back. It took an hour or two to figure out which was the right driver I needed.
I'm holding off on compiling the new kernel until I assemble my new desktop, just waiting for the case and CPU. Or I may just put Fedora 10 on.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Just make sure you stick on eee-control (you'll have to install some of their acpi script stuff, all easy to do with the package manager) and turn off the junk you aren't using.
I had been using stock ubuntu before that, with the array.org (go there, set up his repos) kernel + eee-control. Battery life was better using that than ubuntu-eee, so I may end up back there yet.
Wireless is a bit touchy either way. I've heard that using ndiswrapper fixes that, but wireless has been "good enough" for my use.
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What exactly are you using your EeePC for? If you are simply using it for email and internet I don't see how XP can be so frustrating. I use XP on my 901 and it works like a charm for what is essentially surfing, msn (with miranda client of course) and taking lecture notes. I find the secret to increased usability and efficiency with XP on a small screen is to disable all desktop icons, move the taskbar to the top and keep your start menu organized.
I run xampp with Apache server on my Asus EEE 1000 and it performs quite well along with a wireless usb modem talking to my server for a Geocaching application. The application fits on a USB flash drive as well. If you are into Geocaching you can see various versions at http://gpsmancer.com/ All in all the Asus with WinXp is a great netbook that runs my applications perfectly.
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.
Read my blog.
I installed slackware 12.2 on my eee 900, (had to do it from an SD card, but thats not too hard) and everything works. I didn't have to monkey around with anything to get anything working. I just copied my rc.inet1 from another machine to bring up the wireless at boot and viola. It's wayyyy faster than XP too. Feels really good on that little machine.
i have a roll of electrical tape.
On my EEEPC 901, I installed stock Ubuntu 8.04 from a USB flash drive using UNetbootin, then added the array.org kernel (http://www.array.org/ubuntu/index.html). All hardware works, including accelerated video, wireless, etc.
Ubuntu 8.10 on the same netbook was horribly slow.
...put a little effort into making it work how you want it to work. Every distribution has a fairly comprehensive wiki at this point. Even if they don't, you can almost always figure out what to do from another distro's howto and documentation. Gone are the days of reading obtuse man pages on flickering consoles. Anyone with a length of cat5 and an afternoon can solve 99% of their issues and come out the better for it. Unless, of course, you get frustrated and fashion a noose with the ethernet cable.
I've been using the 9.04 Ubuntu netbook-remix release without problem (even though it is an Alpha4 release). You might give it a try. The interface is very convenient for smaller screens and resolutions.
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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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Mandriva 2009.1 everything works out of the box
and the wireless as well as everything else works perfectly. I tried to do a dual boot to install XP and failed. The reason I was trying to install XP was that I wanted to use the Verizon Adapter for wireless via my cell as I didn't want to pay T-Mobile at a starbucks for wireless. The drivers/software to use a Verizon cellphone for Internet access via your computer is only available for Windows (and Macs too I suppose) but not for Linux. But as far as regular wireless/oofice and such go, Ubuntu works just fine for me out of the box.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
If you replace the wireless card with an intel based wireless card, you should have no problems with any linux distro. I replaced my wireless card on my MSI Wind with the Intel 3945 and have no problems in linux http://www.google.com/products?q=intel+PRO+3945
I installed ubuntu-eee 8.04.1 on my rather old eee (701 4G ) and it worked fine. Wireless, no slow down, the interface is good for small stuff and the battery drains fast - when the thing is turned off, this is a bug with the computer's itself and not related with the OS - I am not sure if it could have really gone much worse with 8.10 or if it is the computer that got worse with new releases.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The HP "Mobile Internet Experience" Distro, designed to be only used on their netbooks, but _excellent_ on others, including my Lenovo S10 is my recommendation. You install it by using HP's "recovery usb key" tool :)
Get it at http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=2020&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&product=3860346#
It's very usuable, and fits right into the idea of a personal device as a resource to you. Plus, it's Ubuntu underneath, so you can add whatever you want :)
I've got an eeebox b202, which is supposed to be basically a eeepc 1000HA or something. Anyways, everything works, except I can't get hardware acceleration and OpenGL working with the Intel 954GMA display chip. Nothing I've found on the 'net makes it work properly. I suspect it's just too new for the drivers to have properly caught up.
I'm using Gentoo, which I use on all of my machines.
Debian unstable and a self compiled, patched (for the cam and wireless network), vanilla kernel work fine here.
I'm planning on using ArchLinux when I get mine. They seem to have good community support, and it doesn't come with any fluff you don't need.
It is a bit more difficult to install, though.
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Arch works well for my Eee PC 1000. If you choose another distro, the Arch wiki still makes for a decent guide.
I use standard Ubuntu Intrepid, with this custom kernel http://www.array.org/ubuntu/setup.html which was really easy to setup, and works like a charm! There is also an ACPI script which gives all the extra buttons on the EEE something useful to do. I've been running it since Intrepid was released, and prior to that I used Hardy. Neither have given me any problems.
This is a good distro for netbooks. Easy Peasy has gone to some effort to create a desktop that accomodates such a small monitor.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I'm almost afraid to say it with the army of Ubuntu users on here, but I've installed fedora 10 on both an Asus Eee 901 and a Dell Mini9 for a couple different friends and it's worked fantastic.
Just don't forget, assuming solid state disk, to set noatime in fstab for the appropriate mount point(s). You'll see a massive improvement in performance, and, in theory, life span of your flash based disk.
I use easy peasy on my 1000. It's renamed from ubuntu-eee but uses 8.10 instead of 8.04. It has worked much better for me than ubuntu-eee did. Not sure how it compares to eeebuntu since I just heard about that from comments here, but I'll probably give that a try tonight to make sure I'm not missing out on the fun.
http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/02/14/fedora-eee-pc-eeedora/
I want to simply be able to buy hardware with Linux installed, and I expect that hardware/software to "just work".
While I have the experience to solve problems, it is simply not reasonable to accept buying products that are not properly supported.
I reckon that a broken dist or hardware without OS is better than paying for Windows, that is still not satisfactory situation.
After ditching the stock xandros that came on my eeepc 700 2G, i tried ubuntu-eee netbook remix (now easy peasy) but performance was not great. I tried eeebuntu-base which was a lot better and includes one-click scripts for you to run at anytime to get the configuration and performance just right for your model. but for what i use my little laptop for (local or remote development) i realized that a command-line was really all i needed so now have arch linux installed with toofishes' custom kernel for the eee and no GUI (for now). It boots fast, only has what i need and pretty easy to update with pacman (rolling distro). Its pretty awesome. The Arch Linux wiki entry for installing on an eee has some great general purpose advice http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_on_the_Asus_EEE_PC#Avoiding_Pitfalls
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IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I tried Ubuntu on my 701 -- could not get wireless to work. Then I went to Mandriva spring 2008. Everything worked perfectly.
I have recently taken off the Xandros distro on my eee 701 and replaced with an Ubuntu derivative called Crunchee. Its based upon a more generic Ubuntu distro called CrunchBangLinux. It is very lean and minimal - so wrong end of the spectrum for someone who likes Vista then
I am writing this post on an Eee PC 1000 that arrived yesterday. It is running Jaunty Netbook Remix. Everything (for me) worked "out of the box" in Jaunty, even web cam and wireless. Just because it is in Alpha doesnt mean it cant be used. The one down side is that it is the i386 build and no LPIA, but I can live with that till it goes live in April.
snowulf.com
Congratulations to the Easy Peasy project (http://www.geteasypeasy.com/). :-/
The distro has been called Ubuntu EEE before they were contacted by Canonical requesting them to change the name. Their suggestion was "Ubuntu for EEE" or something along the lines. But the maintainer of Ubuntu EEE thought it would be nice to call the distro "Easy Peasy" a completely unrelated, silly name that noone will ever recognize as an operating system.
This Slashdot question is a symptom of this very bad choice of project name.
You may want to check out Debian, especially now Lenny has been released as Debian 5.0. It includes a decent amount of work from the DebianEeePC team (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC), and runs nicely. Like all distributions, there are a few rough edges for some Eee PC models (due to hardware differences and less-than-ideal drivers being available).
In the end, it will probably depend largely on what people are used to in terms of Linux distributions. But if you like Debian and Debian-derivatives, I would certainly recommend taking a look at Debian.
It is also important to note that the DebianEeePC project has a very active developer and user community that is more than happy to help out both newbies and more experienced users.
I haven't seen it posted yet so far, but the couple times I've used it it was pretty nice. I don't personally own an EEE so I can't say much more than to look into it.
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I realize that there is some intent of humor behind the post, but really why would it be so hard to believe that someone actually gave Vista a serious look as opposed to having a blog-formed bias against it before using it? Yes, XP is not "giant piece of crap" but Vista is better.
Sorry, I'm just tired of hearing crap flung against Vista when people don't give it a serious look. I look forward to Windows 7 for somewhat similar reasons as the Vista-haters - we won't hear any more about Vista. But the difference is that I'm hoping it will take the bias away as well.
Prove it.
I have the Asus 1000 (solid state drive) and use Easy Peasy (I think www.geteasypeasy.com). It works well with suspend/lid closing/wifi. I don't know if this is typical, but it even worked correctly with my Verizon Wireless EVDO aircard, so I'm happy.
Vote for global prefs bug
If you truly prefer Vista to XP, then the only course of action I can recommend for you is euthanasia.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What about FluxFlux?
http://fluxflux.net/fluxflux-eee/index-en.html
That would be Xandros Linux for the Eee PC. Reason: as maligned as it seems to be, it still is the one that supports the 1000H's hardware the best.
I myself use Slax, because I have the time to tweak it, and because I don't have a HD in my Eee PC (only 4GB of SSD), and do believe that for the "smaller" Eee PCs is the absolute best out there, but if I was a novice AND I had a 1000H or 1000HD, it'd go with what Asus prepared for it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I've used the default Xandros os and ubuntueee but for the last few month or so I've been using a CrunchBang EEE specific distro and I've been very happy with it. Works out of the box with all drivers present and reduced font size for those itty bitty screens. http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/424/cruncheee-81001-release-candidate-1/
"You just speak for judgmental, obnoxious pricks that believe the world should operate only according to their narrow-minded rules."
Like he said, he speaks for all of slashdot.
You said nice things about Vista......and you think you can just walk away.
You have a flash hard drive in the eee, so I would suggest using an ext2 or other non-journaling file system. Depending on how you use swap files you might also want to reduce the swappiness (I would be more specific, but discussions of swap space always precipitate flame wars). Wireless is the place you are most likely to run into support problems. The problems are resolvable, but it is still the area you are most likely to have headaches.
Have the driver issues for the full set of multi-touch features on the eeePC touchpad been worked out yet? I recall seeing a post somewhere that the full functionality was only available under windows.
And Xandros works just fine for me. There are a few quirks to getting KDE installed, but as for the rest of the packages, you can't beat apt-get.
The advantage of the Xandros distro is that it already supports the EEE hardware, and whatever else you find lacking can be made up with apt-get. Of course, it didn't ship with KDE, gcc, gThumb, etc..., but finding and installing the software was fairly trivial.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
It was easy to install and all the hardware runs fine without tweaking. However, just a couple caveats:
-the "Control Panel" (drakconf) is sometimes too big (eeepc has same issue with programs like Skype) -Don't think it automatically sleeps when shut (I think fn + Esc works, though)
To increase performance, you can try other window managers (Mandriva makes it pretty easy to try other WM). Just 2 cents from someone who has actually installed a different distro on their eeepc . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Psst. It's OK. Not everybody has to agree with your views. Part of free speech is being told to shut up sometimes. Now, if the gov't is silencing you by force, that's a different matter.
just go ahead and put vista on it.
I tihnk you're crazy but its a free world.
I don't know about the colonies but here in the UK the EEE originally shipped with puppylinux. :D
For what it's worth, I put eee-ubuntu (which has now been renamed to "EasyPeasy", I guess) on my asus 900 and it runs pretty well. From the other options I looked at, none really seemed any better; and EP had the advantage of having a very easy install.
This may have changed in the past 4-5 months but so far it's best option I've found, particularly for something that worked out of the box pretty much from the get-go (barring a one-line change to fstab to get the SDcard slot working, and that might be fixed now, I dunno).
Damn - wish I had mod points. Problem would be to decide between 'funny' and 'insightful'...
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.
Easy Peasy is the rebranding of Ubuntu-eee and uses Ubuntu 8.10 as its upstream. So it's the next version up from the Ubuntu-eee that others have mentioned. It works great on my wife's eeePC 1000.
http://www.geteasypeasy.com/
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
I'm typing this from my 901 running Fedora 9.
It does not work (completely) out of the box; the things that you need to tweak are the following:
Boot Fedora from USB, by downloading any live iso (or the netinstall if you are short on space) and following http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo (or the relevant page in the manual: I'm frankly more happy with the manual)
Install the whole thing (SSD users might want to check out Theodore T'so blog on how to correctly format an SSD to have semi-decent performances)
See that it works "sort of"
Check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Eee_PC. It does not have all the solutions but has valid pointers for googling.
The GMA950 is going to be a pain as usual, so if you plan to run compiz like I do you should google for optimizations of the driver. /etc/X11/xorg.conf but this might be outdated information.
It mostly boils down to inserting
Option "MigrationHeuristics" "greedy"
in the Device section of
However, this is to improve performances, the stuff will work (just slow, and compiz can REALLY slow down apps like Firefox)
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
I am currently composing this on an Eee901 with Intrepid. On the #ubuntu channel at irc.freenode.net, they told me to add the repository for Ubuntu Eee which essentially only offers an Eee kernel and modules (with all the proprietary drivers -- yes, I know, yuck, but they are supposed to be replaced with Free Software soon).
The repo is:
deb http://www.array.org/ubuntu intrepid eeepc
Everything works, and you do not have to deal with that silly Ubuntu mobile interface. If you download EeeControl from the standard Ubuntu repos, you will be able to switch on and off the Wifi, Bluetooth, camera, and SD card reader. You will also be able to set the processor as with Asus' "super hybrid engine".
I have been using this setup for more than two months and find it is very responsive. It is easy to set up, too. Just make sure you always keep Grub pointing to the Eee kernel.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Stick with XP and just turn off the visual effects, unnecessary services (Indexing, BITS, Security Center, etc.) and see the machine fly. There are countless guides on the web that tell you which ones to disable.
..but I've been using XP for 7 years now, and it's far from being crap. It's the most stable OS I've ever used, second only to the Mac OS.
Guess you never used Windows 2000?
That is still by far the best OS ever made by MS. It was stable, fast, not bloatware. Everything an OS should be, which is enable applications to run well and not try to replace things at the OS level which should be separate applications.
If it wasn't for the superior USB support in XP (which MS could easily have added to Win2k) I would never have upgraded.
I am running #! Cruncheee on my 901 since quite some time now after trying a multitude of distributions. It has for my taste the right apps, the right theme, concentrates on getting things done, is rock stable, supports all eee hardware out of the box and does all of that at lightning speed. Another nice thing is that it is an ubuntu based distro, so you get the benefit of excellent packages, etc. The live CD, which also installs once booted, can be had at http://crunchbanglinux.org/ in the download section, and even from the live CD (ok, more likely the live-USB-stick) it already runs very fast!
Reality is just a bunch of illusion...
I recently bought a Samsung NC-10 to replace a Panasonic toughbook for field use. It became necessary when I tried to scramble out the door on an emergency call with a 73 pound toolbag and got a back injury for my trouble. After a crash diet, the bag weighs 19 pounds. The point is that this netbook is not a starbucks commuter. It's heavily used in a gritty production environment... something the Samsung engineers would certainly call "non-ideal" as they twitched.
The office has standardized on Fedora10 on the desktop, and CentOS on the servers. The netbook came with XP home on it with two partitions already on the 160GB hard disk. One small adjustment in the stock setup menu, and I have an adequate XP partition and a blank 100GB partition. When installing Linux, or any OS for that matter, on a Laptop, I expect driver issues and I thought a netbook would be worse because of the integration. Without a CD or DVD drive, it's necessary to install using a flash drive. It's relatively easy to install a Fedora10 boot img on a flash drive if you RTFM.
Pop the USB drive in, punch the power button, enter the BIOS, set to boot from USB, reboot. Now for the hard part right?
Everything just worked. You read that right. Everything. Period. No setup other than the standard run through the menus, which I completed in a vehicle driving through the middle of nowhere with no internet access. It's almost like Samsung designed the NC10 with Linux in mind.
The only areas where I rolled up my sleeves and used the CLI was for the MP3 and DVD playback, stuff typical of Fedora / Redhat, and setting up some of the proprietory security for the office. These were things I had to do for every machine.
The only gotchas were some of the menus extend beyond the short screens. I am adjusting those as I come across them. They work fine in the office connected to an external monitor, mouse and keyboard.
Your mileage will vary. This is what worked for me. My back is happier, and I am able to move quickly and efficiently, though the back of my brain still thinks I left most of the tools behind. I'll get used to it, just like I'll get used to the delete key placement... eventually.
It's just Ubuntu with OpenBox / lxpanel and lightweight software, but that combination leaves you with lots of screen real estate. Everything works out of the box for me. The dark default theme isn't for everyone, and you can probably brew your own Ubuntu to do the same thing, but it's worked for me on my 1000hd.
Windows usually works quite well if it's shipped on the PC, as is the case here.
Read the comments here: Linux experience has been hit-and-miss using it on Eee. When people say "it was great, I just had to fix _______" and "It only takes xx additional packages to make it work right" that means that out-of-the-box performance shouldn't be expected.
commentary: I'm always amazed by topics like this because they demonstrate some shortcomings in Linux that make it unsuitable for people looking for EASY solutions, and yet the give-me-linux-or-give-me-death crowd acts like such things don't happen any more. Can't we just accept that Linux still isn't ready for everyone and get on with life?
end soapbox.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
"I can't stand XP. I know it's odd, because I actually like Vista, but XP is such a giant piece of crap..." Sounds like trolling from a MS VISTA developer or marketing guy... I know of no one who actually uses a UMPC that would prefer VISTA... -bob
Apparently, there is a version of Puppy for the Eee, naturally called Pupeee!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Sorry, just checked the actual machine and it's Fedora 10 that worked fine out of box. Fedora 9 did have a problem with the wireless drivers, but everything else worked fine. Instructions here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc for putting fedora on your Eee
Good question. I've got a eee 701SD and Ive had the same problem.
Instead of dealing with eeeBuntu and its ilk, I went on and put on Jaunty. After downloading the r8780 driver source and using module assistant to compile, it works like a charm. I also used the alternate cd so I could get full disk encryption, which was my biggie requirement.
And after 9.4 has been "released", it will also support lots of 'cloud based' things, so the small storage will be no big deal at all.
I am probably going to get shot down here for even suggesting such a thing, but a good friend of mine has an eeePC, and, after trying various linux distros, and XP, actually found that Windows 7 worked impressively well. He had to use Vlite, or whatever the Windows 7 equivalent is, to strip it back so it would fit on the highspeed SSD chip, as opposed to the larger drive, but apart from that, its fantastic. I have had a play with it myself, everything works, and there are no compatibility issues, it seems to be rock solid. And comparable in speed to XP. Certainly its ability to go to sleep and wake up is very snappy indeed. So yea, don't necessary get hung up on Linux, give Windows 7 a go!
I know this doesn't respond completely to the question, but I really recommend the default install that comes with the EEE Linux model. I got the EEE because I knew that I didn't like Windows and that I didn't like fussing with installing Linux on a laptop. It works great, it's very very very fast, it uses IceWM (which I have always liked), it is easy to configure (by editing a simple text file), and it is Debian based, which allows for easy software installation. The only significant negative is that it is based on a fairly old Debian, meaning that the default repositories are a bit outdated in their software.
Furthermore, it meant that I was encouraging a manufacturer to sell Linux pre-installed. I literally put my money where my mouth was. Now, it is too late for you to do that, so I recommend you go to the eeeuser.com forums, where you will find fairly knowledgable forum support for your question. Best of luck.
Not bad for a "dead" OS:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee
First off, I've never had XP not run well out of the box on any computer I've installed it on. That would include everything from pre-built Dell junkboxes to my own homebuilt machine a few years ago.
Second, I've got to agree with the soapbox commentary. Linux is not easy and Linux is not ready for mass consumption. And there's another reason why Linux isn't ready besides its difficulty of use: there is no such thing as the Linux OS, there are only hundreds of flavors of Linux of various popularity. There are currently 3 versions of Windows that 99% of people will be dealing with: XP, 2000, and Vista. If you want one for desktop use, that would be XP. See? Easy. If you ask 100 different people what distro of Linux you should get you'll get at least 120 answers. So even if there happens to exist a perfect distro for me out there I'll probably never find it because I actually like spending my time on the computer doing stuff other than trying out new distros and I'm sure many other Windows users would agree.
mmmm...forbidden donut
I've got a 700 series and have been using Easy Peasy, which is a successor to Ubuntu-EEE (one of the other Ubuntu-derived distros). Despite the lame name, it's a fairly nice Ubuntu-derivative. My main complaint about it is that it tries to maximize almost everything, and sometimes does so to my dialog windows etc (I'm sure there's a setting to turn that off, but I haven't found where yet).
Other than that, overhead is fairly low and it's easy to navigate.
...and I think it's best to go with Eeebuntu and then just get rid of the cruft from the initial install. There are a lot of things I don't like about the choices in Eeebuntu (an MSN client by default, really?!) but out-of-the-box it offers scripts to fix known bugs/hardware problems with your model of the eeepc, the kernel customized for your eeepc, plus the netbook-launcher if you want it. I tried Ubuntu Eee back in September, but it wasn't as well-polished as Eeebuntu back then. Maybe it is now that it's EasyPeasy.
You can also go with a vanilla Ubuntu install and make all these tweaks yourself...I was an "early adopter" of the Eee PC 1000, so I can vouch that there's plenty of info out there on the inets if you plan to take that route.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
I have a 900sd, and through a lot of googling, I came across Crunchbang linux, which is very minimalist and runs default on openbox. You can of course change this relatively easily to gnome or kde or whatever you prefer. I highly recommend Cruncheee because its very fast compared to the default Xandros installation, or the Ubuntueee installation (now called Easy Peasy). Cruncheee comes with pretty much complete driver support right after installation. Wireless worked right after installation, so did microphone, so did SD slot support, and based on the reports Ive seen, so would the webcam (if I had one, but instead it has a plastic covering? wtf?). Ive used this distro pretty much since the beginning I got the netbook, and am very pleased with it. It even comes with PCman as a file manager. The only gripe I have is that I got a crappy eee pc (for christmas, cant complain). It was supposed to have a webcam, doesnt. Was supposed to have an 8gb harddrive, instead it has a 4 gb harddrive. I actually have more space available in my sd slot than on my freakin internal harddrive. It doesnt even have an Atom processor like the rest, it has Celeron. So im selling it and getting the 1000 instead, lol.
There is a distro called Freeeee for the eee pc, made by jaromil of rastasoft. It's really cool and plays a guitar solo as it's starting up. That's the kind of thing a linux distro should provide!
http://freeeee.org/ seems to be down, but you can get the latest images here:
ftp://therion.noldrin.com/pub/freeeee/
With my 900, i've had no issues using the ath5k drivers compared to the ndiswrapper method or the older madwifi drivers.
I've posted an update to the repository from the upstream ath5k developers. This is currently available as 2.6.27-11-eeepc
You may install this version by hand to test, as its not being pushed out automatically yet.
$ sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.27-11-eeepc
-Adam
Well, I've been fooling with a much smaller and lower-end Eee over the last week or so (the $200 900a), and I'm just brimming with nasty experiences to share.
First and foremost- if you are a fan of Windows and your Eee has a non-SSD HDD, you really need to be using Windows 7. They are still passing out serial numbers and the disk images themselves are easy to find on bittorrent sites. It's honestly fantastic. Everything you like about Vista is just better in Windows 7 and most of what you didn't like is gone- plus the performance, damn.
Second, let's talk linux: running Linux on the EeePC is a real Monkey's paw sort of experience. With every upside is a cruel and awful downside-- and such. For instance, you can run Ubuntu Netbook Remix which uses Intel's LPIA architecture instead of i386-- that's really cool because it does a lot of static scheduling (I believe) and SSE3 optimization that is really great for the Atom processor... but it's not going to support you hardware perfectly. It's an OEM product so no time has been devoted to working out issues with the Asus ACPI. Basically, you're supposed to be paying Canonical for a working branded experience like HP and Dell did... unless you feel like doing the work yourself.
Easy Peasy 1.0 has all the hardware support down, but once more you're going to be running Ubuntu Netbook Remix's interface. I mean, let's face it- The EeePC 1000 is not just a device, it's a full computer. You probably want to treat it like an actual system not a toy. UNR's interface is really attention deficit and designed for serial single-tasking. Besides, I like to stay away from custom spins and stay on the mainline to receive better support and more timely upgrades/security updates. I'd rather not my system's health be dependent on some random stranger's freetime.
Honestly, you need to look into Mandriva. It's a fantastic and very pretty home distribution with full official support for the EeePC. I would recommend keeping a tiny FreeDOS partition (or usb key) around for bios updates, which come pretty frequently and often work in concert with system updates on Mandriva. You really should try it-- it might be just what you're looking for if you want solid support and to avoid headaches. Furthermore, if you want to get really creative you can always set up a custom system with LXDE-- I can link to a guide if anyone asks.
Personally, I run Asus Xandros on my machine with unionfs disabled to conserve diskspace (I only have 4 gb!). It's a well adjusted distribution with full support for the ACPI and a great CPU frequency profile. Also, it comes with all the codecs you'll need and uses all mplayer by default (no gstreamer, no pulseaudio-- simple and practical). The only downside (on the 900a) is that the touchpad's tap functionality is just awful when using the elantech X driver. I am not sure if it would be the same case on a 1000. If you want the Xandros distribution, you can probably torrent it- it doesn't use CD keys or anything.
Alternatively, you could also try HP's MIE image (Mobile Internet Experience). It's pretty close to an Eee 1000, so just get the support tool from HP that's designed to make a "recovery image" for you and just "recover" your EeePC. That's a custom spin of UNR + software and codecs-- not a bad way to go.
So, in conclusion:
1. Windows 7 (as supported as Vista)
2. Xandros (if you have it) (fully supported)
3. Mandriva 2009.0 (Gnome) (fully supported)
4. HP MIE (possibly supported)
5. Ubuntu Netbook Remix (partially supported)
6. Easy Peasy 1.0 (fully supported but crappy)
And there ya go.
Do it yourself. It's your dream and you can live it yourself.
Sigh, I *know* both that I can do it myself and how to do it.
It would be nice to recommend something *I* didn't need to setup for someone.
I've been using the eee version of Crunchbang. http://crunchbanglinux.org/blog/2009/01/18/crunchbang-linux-81002-released/ Works flawlessly with full driver support, is very fast, and isn't brown.
I agree that the battery life and response is poor on an EeePC 1000 with Ubuntu or its EeePC-specific derivatives.
I think you can get the best perfomance out of it with Gentoo and XFCE, but for your needs Xandros, the default EeePC Linux distro, might be best. I was skeptical about Xandros when I picked up my EeePC 1000 a few months ago, but gave it a fair chance.
Really its biggest general drawback is the Candyland-like interface and this is modified easily enough. Xandros has a great advantage in that it integrates well with the firmware, and you'll almost certainly get better battery life and response from it than you have w/ Ubuntu-eee.
I'd might even have stuck with Xandros, except for its lack of 802.1x wireless support. For me that was a showstopper, and despite my best efforts I was unable to get WPAsupplicant to work. So if you don't need 802.1x, give Xandros a try.
I'm using Crunchbang Linux on my EEE 901.
The user interface is "house key"+key press rather than fat icon oriented. It's slim (not lots of cruft), based on Ubuntu Intrepid so you can pull in anything you need, uses array.org kernel, has eee configuration applet. Works for me.
The question boils down to wether you like Debian or Ubuntu more. I like Debian, and now with the release of Lenny, I see it's one of the officially supported sub-architectures.
http://debian-eeepc.alioth.debian.org/
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC
I was an early adopter with an eee pc 701. I've tried xandros, xubunt 7.10, ubuntu 8.04, and ubuntueee (also 8.04-based I think). I currently use Arch Linux (www.archlinux.org). Arch is not a beginner distro, but it is 'easy' to customize. Hotkeys and wireless work fine with the right modules installed, but I have had trouble getting it to power-off gracefully when the battery is down.
EePC 900
Install works fine.
Issues:
The machine hibernates and fails to bring back the wireless card.
Driver for the wireless that comes with the eePC is OK, but I get better sensitivity from the driver here:
http://wireless.kernel.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-old.tar.bz2
Pretty simple....just unpack, make install should work, reboot.
Fedora 10's network manager is quite good, and is usable for the average joe with the current posted updates.
Power management works.
If you do not like the login manager, you can just add a file to the /etc/sysconfig directory called "desktop" and place the following line in there:
DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE
(KDE fanbois....:-)
KDE 4.2 is quite a looker, however, you can't use the special effects options as the machine is just too slow.
One other thing.
I put Fedora 10 on the large internal SSD drive on the eePC 900, and left the original partition intact so i can just swap drives in the BIOS and reboot to get the original install.
The only consequence is that disk access is horrendously slow. Lots of disk lag. So I am sorta considering the idea of putting Fedora on a SD II card (8 Gig) for booting off of.
I did make a swap partition on the SSD, but the unit has 1 Gig of memory, and never uses it for what I use it for: XMMS, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Mplayer, Kismet, Samba, Portable BGP router.
Video performance is OK. I watch some movies on it and it works pretty well.
Also, make sure you get the latest BIOS update as it solves a shutdown problem with the eePC's ACPI.
The original software install has a easy way to install BIOS updates, so that alone is worth keeping the original install.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Running Gentoo on my MSI Wind U100 (w/ voided-warranty-updated-RAM-and-HDD-goodness)
Works fine here... although a bit of flakiness with the Wifi driver.
Queue the "i don't want to waste a week installing my laptop!!" people. Some people like it. The time spent was not bad. Took me a day and a half off-and-on. It's worth it with limited resources. It's almost as snappy as my desktop AMD X2 5200+ w/ 4GB RAM (which is also Gentoo)
While the device support requirements are a bit different from the old 701 I'm running to the more recent Eee's, all will run Ubuntu's variants fine if you install with the customized kernel from array.org. I'm very happy with Xubuntu. Keep in mind that if you boot with a stock kernel, you won't have wireless working - so at a cat5 cable ready if you get stuck at that stage before the array.org kernel's installed.
There are various enhancements out there for particular models that will give you better support and displays for the function keys, that you can find by checking at eeeuser.com. But you should have a usable system with a stock Ubuntu + array.org kernel.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I recently installed Eeebuntu on my Acer Aspire One (AAO) with no problems so far. I used the NBR install from eebuntu.org. The install process was quite simple and essentially involved using a bootable USB jump drive with the install image on it. So far I am loving the OS change and wouldn't go back to the original Linpus system. The Eeebuntu desktop interface feels much more full-featured and looks nice without losing the simplicity needed to appeal to a general audience. A few notes from my experience: * Wireless on/off indicator LED doesn't work. * The boot time is slower than the original OS: about 15 seconds on the Linpus (the original OS included with AAO) and 35-40 seconds for Eeebuntu. * Wireless worked right away from the default install. * Ext3 filesystem was slow (likely the SSD) so I changed the default filesystem selection from ext3 to ext2. * Tried various optimizations including installing "preload", removing unecessary services such as the print applet, bluetooth daemon, extra VT's etc... So far I am down to 29 seconds (a whopping 1 second improvement. ** My AAO is the one with 1GB memory and the 16GB solid state disk.
Why did you feed the troll??
I am a beginner to intermediate level desktop user of Linux who is getting ready to buy a Samsung NC10 netbook and plan on dual booting it with ubuntu. I am COUNTING on the linux community to help me along the way. From what I have seen, it isn't assholes like the AC who keep linux from getting any traction, it is the overwhelming amount of information out there about the 'alternative' free OS. The linux user community and their willingness to help others is the reason that it is UP to 1.2%
These cheap netbooks will keep the % going up.
http://www.tomandemily.com
I have an eee 900 and the first thing i did when i got it was to install kubuntu 8.04 on it. using the kernel from www.array.org , worked kind of good for like 6 months or so. but i got tired of it. So a few days a go I decided to install OpenSuse 11.1 on it, when i finally got the installer working (from usb) everything worked good, some minor problems with wifi but most works from the start. I got a nice surprise that audio worked trough hibernation (i can suspend and resume while playing a movie etc) which did't work with kubuntu (better audio driver or something). Anyways kde 4.2 desktop with all the fancy 3d stuff works great on my eee and im now a big fan of opensuse ;)
Sorry, I must be new here... I fixed the formatting of my previous post.
I recently installed Eeebuntu on my Acer Aspire One (AAO) with no problems so far. I used the NBR install from eebuntu.org. The install process was quite simple and essentially involved using a bootable USB jump drive with the install image on it. So far I am loving the OS change and wouldn't go back to the original Linpus system. The Eeebuntu desktop interface feels much more full-featured and looks nice without losing the simplicity needed to appeal to a general audience.
A few notes from my experience:
* Wireless on/off indicator LED doesn't work.
* The boot time is slower than the original OS: about 15 seconds on the Linpus (the original OS included with AAO) and 35-40 seconds for Eeebuntu.
* Wireless worked right away from the default install.
* The Ext3 filesystem was slow (likely because of the SSD and the unecessary journaling read/writes) so I changed the default filesystem selection from ext3 to ext2.
* Tried various optimizations including installing "preload", removing unecessary services such as the print applet, bluetooth daemon, extra VT's etc... So far I am down to 29 seconds (a whopping 1 second improvement.
** My AAO is the one with 1GB memory and the 16GB solid state disk.
I use Gentoo on all of my other boxes, so naturally I put it on my new Eee PC 1000H as well (dual boot with the existing XP.) If you're happy with your current distro, why change? That said, I wouldn't recommend this for the faint hearted. The Atheros chipset isn't supported out of the box, so you're offline until you get the current kernel installed on it. I've yet to get proper hardware acceleration out of the Intel 945GME graphics chipset - nor from an Intel 865G chipset at work. If there's an Eee distro that will do this out of the box, I'd seriously consider switching to it.
I've already posted in the thread. Would someone with mod points please mod parent up. I can't see how anyone could see this as trolling.
Redundancy is good And also good.
I'm happily running Fedora 10 on my Asus Eee PC 1000, the one with the solid state disks. I'm sure you could do the same thing yours. Everything works after installing the latest koji kernel for f10, and the akmod-rt2860 wireless driver. http://idolinux.blogspot.com/2009/02/fedora-10-on-eee-pc-1000.html
The pclinuxos has several remixs specifically for eee already that I have tried with all driver support built in, but the stock PCLOS 2009 that is about to be released is suppose to support it out of the box.
It is a livecd distro, that you can also remix to your hearts content. It started as a mandriva spinoff, but has gone way beyond Mandriva for usability, quality, and reliability. None of that after thought throw everything plus the kitchen sink in to the distro just to have more DVD's to ship.
The pclinuxos.com for more info.
Living in Chile
I installed Gentoo on my Acer Aspire One for a very good reason. The Intel Atom N270 is a rather lightweight processor that unfortunately lacks out of order execution, but it does have a very dandy instruction set. MMX SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 are all supported. With so little power available, it makes even more sense to grab every little bit one can get. Unfortunately, as mentioned, your slant in the post was more in the direction of "out of the box"
!
Maybe he is the guy who liked Windows ME but hated Windows 98.
Or the guy who thought ewoks more dramatic than the Wookie.
Maybe he is the same guy who liked Windows ME but hated Windows 98.
Or the one who thought Ewoks had more dramatic potential than the Wookie.
Fry's has the Acer Aspire One on sale for $300 - it comes standard with a 3 cell battery (1 - 2 hours)
I have it -- its a great 2nd portable computer for spare web browsing, coding, mp3, and old-school 2d gaming.
http://shop1.frys.com/search?search_type=regular&sqxts=1&query_string=acer+aspire+one&cat=0&submit.x=0&submit.y=0
Just got these spare parts from Amazon...
9 Cell ( 7+ hours!) Spare Battery, $75
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Lithium-Ion-Subnotebook-Mousepad/dp/B001P0F71G/
Spare AC Adapter, $21
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Subnotebook-Netbook-Mousepad/dp/B001ODA6II/
Cheap way to get XP Home :-)
--
"Gamestar: A famous game developer, or player"
Debian works on any of the Eee PC models.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC
On my 701 it boots in 20 seconds to lxde, wireless just works, suspend works.On my wife's 1000HE everything also works.
Debian Sid LXDE Firefox 3.6.4
GNU/Linux and Firefox, surfing the internet safely.
I don't have an Eee, but I'm going to recommend the same distro I would recommend for any personal use: Mandriva. Runs great on both my Desktop and Laptop. Even picked up my laptop's wifi (A broadcom chip) without any configuration. Download the Mandriva One CD - it's a LiveCD I believe, so you can play with it from there, and it comes with Flash and proprietary drivers and such, unlike the Free version, so it'll take a bit less work to get configured.
Good call on the NC10. For Ubuntu information, here's the page with installation help you want: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NC10
My NC10 is running standard Ubuntu, and gets 5 hours battery life on standard usage. (7 to 8 hours when it's idling.)
I currently have a 701 4G, a 901 20G and have a tracking number for the brand spanking 1000 HE.
Yep, I love dem ASUS!
The question was: which distro for an EeePC. I have tried ubuntu-eee (now easy peasy), xandros, debian eee, cruncheee and a plethora of small and variously customised distros. I guess I would recommend either eeebuntu or debian eee and leave the decision up to you. It boils down to your preference: ubuntu or debian, as I have found the eee forks of these distros to be roughly equivalent.
I have settled on dual booting the original ASUS xandros with eeebuntu (base). The quick off-to-google time is the only real reason I keep the xandros OS on, although I do like to keep the ASUS software up to date simply as a point of comparison. Eeebuntu worked OOTB for me. The base version is lean, and allows you to install the programs you need without fear of fluff. One thing for eeebuntu: for some reason, the downthemall! addon for firefox came installed as admin. This may be fixed now, but its a good thing to be aware of; if you run ffox for the first time as gksu (not sudo!) you can decline the license agreement and the addon is uninstalled.
I chose ubuntu 'cos I like brown, I've been using it for years, and the volume of forum help is pretty awesome if you run into trouble.
Dual booting is a good option in my books. Perhaps you could dual boot windows 7 with your chosen linux distro?
Finally, I just wanted to plug zareason.com. They sell ubuntu based machines, including the eee 1000, that have been thoroughly road tested and come with 2 years of support.
Its the kind of business that got my mum off micro$oft.
I'm a little confused by that, too.. unless someone's feelings were hurt because I said Gentoo is a pain in the ass to install, which is true. Heck, it didn't even support the onboard ethernet. Gentoo is my favorite distro, which is why I went through all the trouble to install it in the first place.
I still recommend the netbook remix. If, however, you want to try Gentoo I highly recommend moving the portage temp dir to a ramdisk to speed things up and minimize reads/writes to the SSD.
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Portage_TMPDIR_on_tmpfs
So you're saying he's George Lucas?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Everything works out of the box except the webcam and the wired ethernet - for which there's a 3rd party driver (google "atge"). Excellent suspend/resume support, audio, compiz, etc. and I get to use ZFS on the 4g ssd as well as an 8gb SD card.
I wouldn't want to run anything else, having tried xandros & Eeebuntu.
disclaimer: I work at Sun. ( so, using OpenSolaris as my main OS in my day jobs, means I naturally am more comfortable with it on my netbook )
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned EeeDora yet, which really is Fedora 8 customized for the Eee. I love it, but then again, I have been using Red Hat/Fedora for about 8 years now. I'm running Fedora on my main development machine, and it's great to be able to sync easily between my Eee and my desktop.
The ISO image download page seems to be out of quota ("This account has been suspended. Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible. "), but you can still get the file easily using Bittorrent: the filename is EeeDora-2008-06-23_01h15m.iso (about 330 MB)(7 seeders when I last looked).
I wrote up some notes on the EeeDora installation process.
Thank you for making my point (and thanks for your help).
http://www.tomandemily.com
No, really! Even with a 16 gig SSD card, Gentoo works great after all the configuration. I sped up the compile by pushing my 900A to 2 gig, compiling on the RAM disk, and setting up the initial config on a VMWare virtual PC.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Debian Lenny (which was released last weekend or so) supports the Eee out of the box. (I'm using it on an Eee1000 now. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC has links to a custom installer which will install all the right packages for you, but it's juts Debian under the hood. I get good battery life and everything seems to pretty much Just Work(tm)
BTW - I am having trouble deciding between the ASUS 1000HE and the Samsung NC10. Any reason you chose the NC10?
http://www.tomandemily.com
http://www.eeebuntu.org/ & no doubt about it!
So strange that I bought one about 10 minutes before I saw this post this morning... Anywho, I'll be trying out eeeubuntu first, I've loved all the input so far, great question OP.
www.thinkgreenthoughts.org
I don't run an EEE pc but i do run linux on my laptop, quite the same thing right? Despite the size then ..
Anyway .. am running openSUSE 11.1 x64 on it, and sometimes my atheros driver locks using NetworkManager, doesn't show me any networks at all and when i tried to create one it disconnected me right away. Even after a restart it didn't work so i turned it on and off then it worked again, so it seems to be the driver which locks up my built in wireless thingy.
But when it does work it works like a charm, very easy to use with NetworkManager (even when using fluxbox)
The easiest way to install Ubuntu on the Eee PC is a custom version called Easy Peasy: www.geteasypeasy.com (formerly known as Eeebuntu).
The latest version is based on Ubuntu 8.10, and includes a Netbook-specific Gnome interface by default, which you can easily change if you prefer plain old Gnome or KDE. The install is very quick and simple, everything works immediately, and it can be done from a USB flash drive. Compiz is disabled by default to give you some more speed and less bugs.
I just installed this on my 701, and it was the easiest OS install on a laptop I have ever experienced.
You're a damn idiot. I have run XP WITHOUT INCIDENT on hardware ranging from a Pentium II 233 MHz to my current rig now. There is NO REASON at all that you should be having problems running XP on your EEEPC. Stop Microsoft hating and just shut up! It's stupid little Linux fanboys like you that give Microsoft a bad name for no reason.
I used my Asus eee 1000HA as my first foray into the Linux world and chose to do so with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. Out of the box, my wifi did NOT work, but it was a single download and 4 typed commands away using ath5k drivers available for free online. My ONLY ISSUE with Ubuntu is the screen size of the eee screen. I do like the default 2x bars on the screen, one at the top and one at the bottom. The vertical size of the screen does make it very hard to click some of the buttons at the bottom of dialogue boxes. This is easily fixed by adding hide arrows to the panels so you can shove them off the screen when they're not needed. You can hide the bars if you want as well, so that's also an option.
Except for the wifi, EVERYTHING so far has worked straight out of the box. I reformatted the second partition as Ext3 and copied some of my MP3 collection to it. With the proper drivers, you can access your Ext3 partitions and drives from Windows if needed. Ubuntu will read the windows partition automatically, so you don't even need that.
In my opinion, slapping Ubuntu on it was the best thing I could have ever done with it... It's SO much more responsive than Windows was.
1) Why did you spend the extra money and buy your not-so-netbook with XP in the first place?
2) The included Xandros on my EEE1000 worked great!
3) EEEbuntu worked fantastically. Everything just worked, right after the easy install. Me very happy!
http://www.eeebuntu.org/
I have been using Puppy Linux loaded on an SD card. Puppy4.1.1 runs fine on my eee701, even the wireless works fine. Puppy is real fast, and is great for cruising the net or checking e-mails.
I have two HP 2133 netbooks (120 gb HD version) and have Fedora 10 on one; Ubuntu 8.10 the other. Other than the VIA graphics (Chrome 9) not working out of the box, I've found Ubuntu to be the better of the two for installation and wifi support.
Linux: When reboots are for upgrades.
I would probably use an insecure distro so we could hack back in if they do take control. I think also, it might be a good approach to ADD features. Whilst astronauts are disciplined and professional, ghost are less organised. Maybe some games to waste a bit of time and get them onside. Maybe SUSE would be a good choice. Then again, we could make it something that required a high degree of technical proficiency. The ghost are behind the proverbial technological eight ball so maybe a text interface would be best.
Then get a Mac. It's still a Unix kernel, and it just works.
I bought one of the first Eee PC 1000 with a 40GB SSD and a Linux distribution that I quickly replaced by Mandriva. It works out of the box and the developers included support for this model even though they were close to the 2009 release. Everything works fine: wireless card, screen size is adapted to the model (a few very big config windows must be moved a little), java, Flash, video and audio codecs, everything is there out of the box (I have the 2009 PowerPack version). Mandriva was one of the first best distros for the desktop and although Ubuntu became popular Mandriva still rocks.
I bought one of the 701 EEEPCs when they first came out (7" screen, 4GB flash). Within a week I put ubuntu on it and it just didn't seem to fit for a netbook O/S. I ended up going back to the stock O/S (slightly tweaked Xandros) and made a few modifications to it, upgrading OpenOffice, removing the UnionFS, etc. It is soooo much faster to start and do the basic netbook stuff like check emails, and check wikipedia when my brain fails me (often). IMHO, Asus did a great job with this distro, and I've found most apps I want that aren't on there are in the Xandros apt repo. These packages work flawlessly, and even Debian sarge packages are generally OK since Xandros is Debian-based.
Youc ould try iDeneb [http://ideneb.net] and there's instructions here [http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1048117/how_to_install_macosx_on_eeepc_pg2.html?cat=59] and here [http://www.scribd.com/doc/6428329/Leopard-on-EeePC]
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
I've installed it on my little 4G and my wife's 1000HD and it works great.
DebianEeePC
Nice thing about Debian is it doesn't install a ton of cruft like Ubuntu seems to. (I've used both distros.)
I had very good results with EasyPeasy on my EEE 901. Everything (incl. webcam, wifi, network, sound, hotkeys, etc.) works like a charm without any tweaking necessary. It's based on Ubuntu.
Yes.
Ask on this excellent eee PC forum: http://forum.eeeuser.com/
There's also a wiki listing several different linuxes: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ (see table of contents on right-hand side)
But, since you seem to be a windows fan, why not try win7 beta?
I tried it, everything worked out of the box, but i'm a *nix person, so eeebuntu went on it again in my case.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
Strange, but http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html does not seem to list "maximize the amount of snide remarks".
Ubuntu 8.10 works perfectly on my EEPC912
Debian Lenny works absolutely perfect on my Eee PC 1000HD. Everything - and I do mean everything - is working flawlessly using only standard Debian packages (yes - with one extra repository added).
For me:
1. It's pretier
2. It was available last month and I didn't want to wait anymore (I think you still can't get the 1000HE)
3. I think it's smaller, not sure though
By the way, if you're ready to wait a bit, Samsung is releasing an update to the NC10 with longer-lasting battery.
Ok, maybe only the Vista kernel... Windows keeps mutating, becoming more like Microsoft Bob. Ironically, the Windows Server 2008 install has many of those stupid things turned off. Even so, it takes just too many tweaks to make it better.
On the Eee, the only good choice for most users is Easy Peasy. Ubuntu is badly pre-configured. I am running XP on my Eee, I can't recommend it because it requires nLite and a monstrous amount of additional tweaks make it SSD friendly. I hate Microsoft for not telling how they managed to make XP run on the XO laptop, fortunately there are many excellent Eee forums out there.
I picked up an Asus EEEBox 202, burned the Fedora-10 dvd to a USB key, and made a home server for DNS, DHCP, wireless, etc. Needed to get updated drivers for the wireless but that was trivial...
Love the box. Low power. Runs everything.
By the way, some more information regarding stock Ubuntu on the NC10:
The webpage you mentioned gives a lot of useful information, but some of it is outdated (or at least I had a different experience).
For example, audio worked out of the box. Then after updating the system, I lost audio out -- for some reason the PCM volume was set to 0. Just go to the volume control panel and reset it to the desired level. My suggestion is to simply jump over the audio "fixes".
The fix for wireless in that page worked perfectly. Some other sites recomend weird stuff like compiling your drivers, and mention that you may get low wifi performance and kernel upgrades break the driver. Performance on my network is good, though I haven't been through a kernel update since installing (I first installed all updates, and then applied the wireless fix).
Internal mic is working perfectly, but I found that when I plug in my headset, it doesn't take over. In the volume control panel you can choose which mic you want to use.
Hotkeys have a lot of problems. They either don't work or they work poorly. Last time I was at that site they just suggested patching the kernel, which I decided was too much work for me. Now I see that it's possible to install the kernel for Jaunty. I'll probably try that once I get home.
The touchpad horizontal and vertical sensitivities are screwed-up. I tried to apply the xorg.conf they suggest, but it didn't work for me. My "fix" was to get used to it (I know -- sucks) until a proper fix was posted. Now I see that they have some more suggestions, I guess I have to try them when I get home.
Finally, you'll probably want to optimize your environment. Gnome takes way too many liberties with how it uses your screen real-estate. This page gives some helpful advice: http://nc10linux.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/maximizing-screen-space
Hey Everyone Last year I took a few weeks and played with a number of linux distros on the eeePC. I've had quite a bit of feedback playing with the different distros. These should explain in detail a bit more about the pros/cons of each distro and what worked and didn't work out of the box. Please take a look: http://justingill.com/blog/2008/03/16/the-perfect-out-of-the-box-asus-eee-pc-linux-install-ubuntu-804/ http://justingill.com/blog/2008/03/18/mandriva-linux-spring-2008-release-on-the-asus-eee-pc/ http://justingill.com/blog/2008/04/04/mandriva-20081rc2-update-3-weeks-after-release/
on these installs and configs boggles the mind.
No wonder the US economy is tanking.
Everyone "smart" is trying to get their netbook
to talk to the interweb.
While I'm sympathetic to the linux ethic and wouldn't use much else for servers, my fanboy side can't help pleading for an apple netbook.
Just freakin work please. I have actual work to do.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If you'll accept that windows isn't ready for ANYONE.
Stupidity is its own reward.
... fashion a noose with the ethernet cable.
Ethernet noose? Bah! That won't hold the weight.
You should use V.35 cable instead. I'm sure OP has plenty of them at home.
Does it run Java?
(Just joking!)
Thanks, I ended up ordering the 1000HE, which shipped today so I should have it Monday or Tuesday. I was really torn about whether to wait or not for the 1000HE since both models seemed to be pretty close from a +/- standpoint. I chose the 1000HE for the extra battery time, better touchpad and better tested wifi connection speeds, but I the battery time and wifi connection speeds were close. I thought about the NC10SE for the better battery life and better touchpad, but in that model they switched to a glossy screen and I wanted matte. It really was a tough decision.
http://www.tomandemily.com
I tried the Moblin live image from the Fast Boot project on my EEE 901. I wanted to see it boot in 5 seconds, like they claim. Instead, it took 37 seconds to boot from a USB stick. The links take you to a generic image, not one that's been tuned for this fast booting. When I saw it bring up Bluetooth and AHAVI, I knew that couldn't be it. Wonder what you have to do to get that speedy boot.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I would say that you should go to distrowatch and look at things like Damn Small Linux or Pupply Linux or similar, which use smaller window managers.
I do hear very good things about the Fedora version eeDora although the stock version with the smaller window manager works well, too.
A little tuning in /proc/sys/vm will help:
- swappiness - make smaller
- laptop mode - set ON
- dirty_expires - set to 1000 or smaller
and of course add memory!