Taming the Wild Eee PC: Replacing the Operating System, Part 1
- Eee PC Configuration Problems
- Replacing the Eee PC OS with Ubuntu
- Next Steps
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Did you find yourself buying an ASUS Eee PC Linux netbook to get a ultraportable Linux box and instead find yourself with a brain-damaged Net appliance with a locked-down desktop full of obsolete software? As sold, it's basically a portable Net appliance—and not all that great a Net appliance at that. Software availability via the regular GUI installer is basically limited to what came with the machine. It’s great for low-intensity websurfing (Firefox 2.x with one open tab), but not for much else.
The fix is to replace the operating system. This article tells you what to replace it with, and provides you with a detailed explanation of how to replace it. Part 1 shows you how to set up a new SD card boot disk for the Eee PC and how to make the Eee PC boot from it.
Eee PC Configuration Problems
So, what's wrong with the OEM Eee PC configuration?
- It’s locked-down desktop. Even when a piece of software is available via apt-get using ASUS's own repository, it won't show up anywhere on the tab-defined spaces of the locked-down desktop.
- The Firefox 2.x version usually crashes every couple of hours with multiple tabs open. When running Firefox with several tabs open, it was taking minutes to switch between tabs and often several minutes to return when I switched back to it from an NX client remote-access session to my desktop machine.
- Improving on the bundled software is difficult because the OEM repositories are ancient. The libraries bundled with it are so ancient I could not install Firefox 3 successfully via binary downloaded from the Firefox site. (OEM only had Firefox 2.x.)
- A netbook is going to go into suspend a lot by the nature of its kind of usage. So the sound suddenly disappearing after going into suspend a few times is irritating.
How, then, do you make an Eee PC useful?
- Replacing the OEM OS with the best slightly modified version of Ubuntu makes it possible to banish all of those problems without introducing new ones.
- Replacing the OEM OS on a bootable mass storage device other than the main hard drive protects the warranty. In this case, we used an SD card that plugs into the Eee PC internal SD reader slot.
Problems with the Ubuntu-Eee OS Replacement
The concept of a distro fork specialized for laptops in theory makes a lot of sense. Ubuntu-Eee is a version of Ubuntu specifically for the Eee PC and for netbooks in general.
As is obvious from the Ubuntu-Eee desktop image shown in Figure 1, there are problems with Ubuntu-Eee's “netbook remix” netbook UI as installed that made it a non-starter, at least in the configuration in which I used it. These problems may not exist when the OEM Xandros installation is replaced with Ubuntu-Eee on the default primary flash drive, but I wasn't going to risk my warranty to find out.
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Figure 1 Ubuntu-Eee UI in action.
Ubuntu-Eee Netbook-Remix UI Problems
Here are specific problems with the Ubuntu-Eee netbook-remix UI:
- Note the password login in the center of the screen. There's supposed to be a visible app window surrounding it and it's supposed to be in front of the background. Note the date to the upper right. That's supposed to be on a taskbar panel across the screen. It is, but you can't see it.
- Chunks of the taskbar fade in and out of visibility, blobs of windows under the one in use appear and disappear, and applications occasionally just sit on the screen but don't do anything.
- The biggest problem I had with it is with respect to deliberate UI design—it's oriented towards using a single app at a time. Try to open an app via the tabbed interface; it automatically goes full-screen, obscuring everything under it.
If you want to install Ubuntu-Eee to a SD card anyway, this page points to a collection of installation methods, and good luck. Alternately, there's JonRamvi.com where you can get a copy of Eee pre-installed to an SD card in exchange for a $50 or more donation to the Ubuntu-Eee project. You might want to find out how big that SD card is before buying.
I wound up so unhappy with the netbook-remix UI that I attempted to replace it with KDE 4.1 using automatic installation via repository to get rid of it. I figured that the problems I had with KDE 4.1 (e.g., non-resizable desktop icons) would be less annoying on a netbook, and almost anything would be better than the full netbook-remix UI. My attempt failed because I ran out of room on the 4GB SD card. But chunks of the Ubuntu-Eee UI are extremely useful, and I will explain later in the article which ones they are and how to get and install them.
If you want to try KDE on a 4GB card or with a KDE version that actually works, try finding a Ubuntu Intrepid repository containing KDE 3.5-10, you can find a repository on the KDE Forum or install Ubuntu-Hardy instead and then KDE, or get an 8GB SD card and install KDE 4.x to that. While I prefer KDE 3.5.x, for the uses I put my netbook to (remote operation of my desktop from wherever, websurfing, reading e-books, and multimedia) I regard GNOME versus KDE as a non-issue.