Paul McGuinness sent us a howto for installing Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC. For the most part, the install is fairly straightforward, but there are a few performance tweaks that are different from a typical desktop system. The big one is that you want to disable the access time feature (noatime parameter in fstab) of the filesystem to minimize disk writes.
There are also a number of non-standard drivers that you’ll need to grab to get things like the wireless card, webcam and sleep features working. The eeeuser.com wiki has an page that describes in detail how to take care of all these issues. Credit to them for the above photo as well.
I peeked at one of these in a store the other day and the hardware seems really sweet. The included OS interface leaves a bit to be desired for someone who’s comfortable and familiar with Linux, so it’s good to see most everything (save for hibernation and a few function keys) is working on a stock Linux distro. I’ll be asking Santa for one of these this year.
Installing Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsey Gibbon on an Asus Eee PC – Link
EeeUser.com Wiki: Ubuntu 7.10 on Eee PC – Link
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