bamed.org

Right after Christmas I purchased myself an Asus Eee PC.  It’s what we call an Ultra Mobile PC(UMPC).  It has a 7″ screen and weighs in at about 2 lbs.  Let me just say, I love this thing.  It comes installed with a customized version of Xandros that’s perfect for new users.  Very SIMPLE.  But simple doesn’t cut it for me, so I quickly started hacking away at the default OS.  There’s a great community built around the Eee at http://www.eeeuser.com, where I found lot’s of useful advice.  But when it came down to it the default Xandros OS was just too hacked to really be usable for me.  The final breaking point for me was the fact that you couldn’t require a password to login to the OS if you were in “Advanced Mode”, that is if you were using a regular KDE interface instead of the “Basic Mode” dumbed down interface.   So I loaded Ubuntu on to a flash drive and installed it on the default OS.  There’s a few things you need to watch for and tweak when using an Eee.  It uses a solid state hard disk, which is basically an SDHC card soldered unto the motherboard, and SDHC’s have a limited number of writes.  So you need to disable any swap partitions, or swap files, and DO NOT use a journaling file system.  Again, you can find all the useful you need to properly setup your OS of choice at the Eeeuser site.

So I got Ubuntu working on it, I got Compiz working pretty well on it, I even got Diablo II, and Wow working, though Wow is kinda laggy.  I take this thing with me everywhere, it is SO handy.  So I ordered a USB DVD-burner, and a USB enclosure for 2.5″ HDD’s.  I had a 120GB 2.5″ HDD lying around, so I plugged it in and managed to get Windows installed on it.  That wasn’t an easy task I might add.  It turns out Windows doesn’t support booting from an USB device.  So I had to install Windows into a VM, then I ran a script I found at USBoot.org which setup the necessary drivers in the VM, then copied the Windows install to the USB HDD, and all is well.

I think my next project is to try install OSX on my Eee.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Hardware, Just Plain Geeky, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.