EEE and the Best OS for it - Parts 2, 3 and 4

(or: Why I've been skipping updates)

Ok, so lately I've been pretty quiet here at the wiki but things have been changing a lot in the past few days and a lot happened. It just didn't get posted here, but it was documented none the less at the LPC email list. And seems like the EEE and the XO will be getting the spot lights at CTC this year.

Well, lets go for the updates:

Part 2

So, I finally decided to play around a bit more with the OSes I knew would run on the eee.

Xandros:

Nothing changed much since the last time. Except that even though the easy mode is pretty convinient, the lack of repositories for the xandros distro was a bit annoying. I would have to compile most of the programs I really wanted to run, including the little game I play every once in a while (Battles of Wesnoth). I don't have time to play much, but when I do, I rather be playing than compiling the game from the source. The eee is fast to compile, but still, not fast enough that I wouldn't notice.

Besides, John needed to do some experiments with my eee on windows, so I had to reformat it.

Then I installed windows again, on the SSD still. After John finished his experiments, I decided that was about time for me to stop being lazy and start playing with the idea of installing windows on the sdhc card.

Turns out that once you get the whole idea right it is not so hard to do, and I've got the cd with the patched version of windows (you have to patch windows so it will run off of the sdhc). And I needed a live cd to transfer all the files from the SSD to the sdhc (you have to install it first on the ssd then transfer it over to the sdhc. After that you can reformat the SSD). The good thing about it is that it would leave me a free disk where I could install another system on it. Can you imagine it? Dual booting on an eee? Pretty nice! Bad thing though is that I've lost the ability to go to standby by closing the lid. Too bad.

The reason why I am leaving this sdhc card with windows on it is because I was also able to enable downscalling of the screen and virtual resizing also. Right now I am running on 800x600 without scrolling. The fonts are a bit too small for those with bad eyes, but with a perfect 20/20 vision I barely feel it. Also, I have access to all of the nice windows programs and viruses this way. (Gotta get my fix of avg updates!!!)

And lastly, I used the empty SSD to install eeebuntu on it. eeebuntu is the optimized version of ubuntu for the eee. They are using the optimized version of the kernel, and the wireless works. Also, the icon sets on this distro are pretty and shinny. I like shinny stuff. Eye-candies makes my eyes happy. Besides boot up time was greatly improved. Next step will be buying an extra 8GB and creating two extra partitions, one for /home and other for /usr/(whatever folder ubuntu uses to store programs. I never remember). Doing so will let me to do some real playing with eeebuntu, but so far it is coming along pretty good.

And that is my setup so far. As soon as I change anything that is worth mentioning, I will post it here. If anybody wants the links for the step-by-step guides I used, just let me know and I will post them also.

Part 3

So, I decided to try yet another OS on the eee, and boy does that make me feel good. I decided to try pupeee or Puppy 301 for the eee. Now, I've got to say that it is not for the faint of heart, and it is extremely geeky. But boy, that little puppy sure is fast, and you know what? It takes soooo little space off of the hard disk. It installs itself on the disk, but at boot up time it loads to the ram and runs from there, accessing the hard disk only if you need to run some program out of it or save something to it, so the ssd is for the most part untouched. And it beats the regular eee xandros boot up time. Mine is taking 7 seconds to boot up. (I do have 2gigs of Ram).

Then again, it is not easy to learn, and it is not base on any distro, so the learning curve is fairly big. Once you get past that, it is only happiness and joy. It comes loaded with programs (and yet the iso is only about 90mbs.)(AND you can run it off of a usb or sd or even a cd an still save the status of your section to a file onto the hard disk.) but I wanted to install my own set of tools (firefox, pidgin, wesnoth, thunderbird) and that fills up a little of the sd. But it is perfectly usable out of the box, with seamonkey for web and email, abiword for word processing, gaim for im and so on, so forth.

Part 4

I know this is getting old, but I can't help myself but keep trying. First of all, I would like to apologize to all of the OLPC supporters out there for not being playing with it that much, but I've been focusing highly on the eee. Mostly because I am a little wary of the keyboard and the interface. The interface problem can be almost easily (well, not as quite easy as on a eee, but still doable.) but the keyboard, oh gosh, so hard to get used to. Anyway, I will get to it in due time. I've been focusing mostly on getting Ourword, toolbox and some other tools at least working on Linux. Once I get that going, I will start thinking about a standard interface. Actually the reason why I am writing today is because I wanted to share a few findings. First of them, Xubuntu. Xubuntu is probably not the very best desktop around but it is fairly easy and yet resourceful enough to be considered. I had no problems whatsoever with the wireless on the eee (then again, I used eeexubuntu first, then upgraded to 8.04. eeexubuntu is based on 7.10) and everything worked flawlessly. It was also really fast (about 20 seconds to boot up.) and I was running it off of the SD so that is a big plus. But what I really wanted to share was about Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I had a chance to test it out on the eee and boy, it has set my expectations high up in the sky. It is not a ground breaking technology, but it is so easy to use (and I mean it.) I would even dare to say that it is easier than the Xandros EEE easy mode. And it runs on top of Ubuntu 8.04 or higher so that means updated packages. I had to test it out off of my SSD because Ubuntu 8.04 is not optimized to run off of SD cards yet, therefore it would take forever to do anything. So I believe that if the Ubuntu team keep their promise of better SD integration for 8.10 then we may be having a champion soon. The Netbook-Remix is not perfect yet and had a lot of flaws, but what I tested was just a pre-alpha sort of deal that I had compiled off of their early source code and now they have some packages up to testing that I haven't had a chance to test yet. I will get to it also soon enough but like I said, this is not my main priority right now. Going back to porting translations tools to Linux, boy I wish I had some help on it. I am not a programmer, and as much as I am eager to learn, I also am having a hard time with C# code. It doesn't make much sense to me, and Mono is not perfect yet either. I've been trying real hard, but my main duties are at the help desk and I frequently don't have time enough to concentrate only on this. Therefore, if anybody feels like helping, I would very much appreciate. If not, oh bother, I will just keep up as best as I can. That is it for today, and hope to be seeing you all at CTC this year.