As Santa Claus had been good to me and brought me an 8Gb SDHC card, I thought I’d have a go at rebuilding my Eee PC with Ubuntu Linux rather than the factory supplied Xandros.

When I first read about the Eee, I was a bit dubious about the choice of Xandros. However, once I got my hands on the Eee, I wqs really impressed at the way the Xandros engineers had tailored their distro for the Eee. First of all, all the hardware ‘just worked’ – all the ‘Fn’ keys did what they should, Suspend/Resume worked, etc – nice to see on a Linux laptop. But on top of that, they had put a lot of thought into designing a user interface that worked on these tiny machines.

Xandros has served me well for the first year, but time has moved on and the Xandros repositories have fallen behind Ubuntu’s. The free software community has had a chance to catch up with the Eee hardware, and has had a go at designing user interfaces for these small format computers.

So, today I loaded Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) onto the Eee, installed the special Eee lean kernel, and added the ACPI scripts. I also set up an encrypted home drive (something I had also done under Xandros – the Eee is too easy to lose…).

As you can see from the fact thet I am posting, all the important things I need are now working. The ‘Fn’ keys don’t all work correctly, and I’m convinced that the Eee is more sluggish than with Xandros. But it’s quite usable, and all my software is bang up to date. So I’d encourge others to take the plunge too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.