John Lindal’s Blog

Asus Eee PC — Part 3

It works! After tracking down a bunch of libraries, everything compiled and runs quite well. I now have a Linux development machine which runs silently and can start up in seconds (since I put it to sleep instead of turning it off).

The default window manager is somewhat annoying, in that window placement doesn’t follow the old rules, but the new rules appear to be the same as in the latest X11 version on Mac OS X, so I think I need to figure out the new rules, rather than switching back to fvwm2

Asus Eee PC — Part 2

I managed to get Eeebuntu installed today. It was a very smooth install, even if I spent a lot of time being confused. I deleted D: in XP, I created a 200M /boot, 10G /, and the rest for /home. Unfortunately, once I booted it up, networking did not work at all After digging around in several forums, I decided to install a newer kernel. This got wireless networking working, but it refused to connect to my router. The solution turned out to be that I had to turn on SSID broadcast. With that issue fixed, I could finally use apt-get to install all the development packages I needed. The next step is to actually try compiling something!

Asus Eee PC — Part 1

My ten year old tower finally died. The hard disk wore out. We had previously bought an Asus Eee PC for my wife’s parents, so I only had to research which model I wanted, not which brand. Despite the time savings, it still ate my 4th of July weekend.

After waffling between SSD and HDD for a couple of days, I finally decided to go with the HDD. It has more total space, and it’s proven technology. The only way Asus can keep the price of an SSD netbook down is to use the cheap stuff. Top quality SSD costs a much as a netbook!

Sadly, it is very hard to find Linux versions of Eee PC’s. The few that I could find were actually more expensive than XP! The option to get Linux appears to have driven Microsoft to slash licensing costs In addition, even Asus engineers tell me that the Linux version shipped by Asus isn’t any good. So I guess everybody gets XP and then either wipes it or dual boots. The CD included with the the Eee PC allows a full factory restore, so wiping carries no risk. I’m going to try to triple boot: XP, Eeebuntu, and Hackintosh. If I can get Hackintosh to work, I’ll buy a license of course.

Currently, I’m using the Eee PC as a processor/HDD. I’ve hooked up my Sony flat panel monitor and a brand new Logitech EX100 wireless keyboard/mouse pair. It feels just like a desktop computer, but it’s portable!

Tomorrow, I’m going to get a DVD drive so I can install Eeebuntu. After all, I can’t do much but blog from XP!