Converting an eee PC disk structure
December 26th, 2007The Asus eee PC is a lovely piece of design, showing how a Linux-powered PC can be tailored to a specific market. The eee PC’s designers wanted to make it simple to reset the PC to its factory settings, so they made all the factory-installed software read-only using a Linux unionfs file system.
This is perfect for its target market of non-technical users, but for people who want to be able to add and remove their own software it is a pain (’removing’ factory installed software doesn’t actually free up any of the precious disk space).
The eee user forums are full of solutions, but they are pretty complex. I thought it would be easiest to bundle all the commands into a script. Using this script, the process becomes:
- Install Puppy Linux on a USB stick - flash Puppy
- Boot your eee using Puppy Linux
- Download the eeepc.sh script onto your eee and run it from the console, like this:
$ wget http://www.mealldubh.org/wp-content/stuff/eeepc.sh
$ chmod u+x eeepc.sh
$ bash eeepc.sh
That’s it. It shouldn’t trash your system; it should preserve your settings and any files you’ve created. It works for me, but if I was in your shoes, I wouldn’t try it unless I had a backup of everything first.
Note: getting networking running under Puppy on the eee is a bit tricky - it’s easiest to copy eeepc.sh onto your USB stick before using it to boot the eee.
