Ubuntu on the EEE

Got myself a apsnking new EEE 900 16G a few months back. I’ve been having fun with it ever since. Despite its size, it’s a surprisingly agile and flexible machine, which has provided me endless hours of what I call Fun: mucking around finding “just the right solutions”. You know, the kind of thing most people think is just another chore; reinstalling and testing different operating systems, system optimizing, etc etc. In other words, what normal people thibnk of as Boring.

In any case, I first chose a normal dualboot windows xp professional / Ubuntu EEE solution, having decided early on that the default Xandros-based operating system didn’t really suit me. In fact, i’d go so var as to call it “useless” for a man of my tastes. In any case, having installed XP from a fast SD card, I was looking for new challenges. I found the perfect one in installing XP onto an SDHC card without the use of an external DVD-rom. After multiple attempts, I succeeded using a combination of this guide and this guide. I might post a howto in the future, if anyone’s interested. All I needed was a few files from the interweb, an USB stick and a SDHC card.

Unfortunately, my original setup was fried in the process. Of course, I got a backup, but since I no longer needed the dualboot solution now that I can boot XP from an SD-card, and since my Ubuntu EEE install got corrupted and uglified during its upgrade to Intrepid, I decided it was time to start over.

Enter EEEbuntu. I got kind of annoyed when Ubuntu EEE changed its name to “Easy Peasy” and I decided to look at my options. EEEbuntu seemed to fit the bill: Better-looking background and overall theme, the addition of an EEE config/tweaking utility, and many other little improvements made me want to try it.

Well, now I have. Its desktop mode is all I could ever want of a regular desktop mode; there’s even a “base install” with a minimum of fuss. Its EEE config utils were great. Unfortunately, I could find no way to quickly switch between regular desktop mode and the Netbook Redux interface, which is much better when you don’t have access to a mouse (touchpads – eeeew). Tried, and failed, to install the desktop-switcher applet. And anyways, the Netbook Redux-based interface abailable in EEEbuntu was sorely lacking in styole and ease of use. This, I discovered, was where Ubuntu EEE excelled.

And so, I now return to Ubuntu EEE. Luckily, Linux is very flexible – I should be able to get the EEE config/tweaking utils from EEEbuntu to work in it (just as I got UCview from te original Xandros to work in Ubuntu EEE), and even though the name Easy Peasy is kind of crap, there’s nothing to stop me from changing the loading screen, the login screen and the destkop background into something I can live with.