Upon receiving my ASUS EeePC 900 I knew I wanted to run Ubuntu on it over the default Xandros Linux OS. With Marc Hugentobler and John Krutsch both having an EeePC 900 as well, I figured this would be a good chance to compare Ubuntu to Xandros on this small wonder of a notebook.
The really good news is I was able to get Ubuntu up and running in less than an hour by following the ubuntu.com EeePC tutorial, and had it fixed up and tweaked out in another hour–and I am no Linux-head. I had done enough preliminary reading before starting to install the Ubuntu distribution that I felt prepared for the handful of quirks and tweaks I would need to do. I admit I had cold feet Saturday afternoon, second-guessing whether Xandros might be less resource-intensive and faster than Ubuntu, but after the weekend I’m now completely comfortable with my choice.
A few things to know about my installation of Ubuntu:
- I installed Ubuntu 8.4 off of a USB drive, which I formatted on Windows XP using UNetbootin to prepare the ISO
- I had to change the BIOS “hard drives” set up to use the USB drive first. This is different than changing the “boot order”
- There were a number of fixes I had to conduct to set up the EeePC hardware: ethernet/loud fan battery remove, Mad WiFi drivers, and a couple other fixes documented on the EeePC Ubuntu wiki
- I also ran a few Ubuntu tweaks documented by Many Ayromlou to tighten things up and further increase performance
- Finally, I installed extra apps like gFTP, and Bluefish, all through the Ubuntu Add/Remove Applications interface
My success was based on the great online resources, wikis, and blogs that are out there–I myself have only minimal knowledge of terminal commands, namely sudo, cd, and chown. The hardest part by far was setting up the wireless LAN with the Mad WiFi drivers, and even that wasn’t too bad, and then discovering some quirks and hunting up fixes.