The EeePC was the first of a new generation of notebook computers now referred to as netbooks. These small, ultra-portable and low priced computers came installed with a customised Xandros Linux distribution, which whilst suitable for new computer users severely limited what more experienced users could do. Several EeePC customised versions of Linux distributions rapidly appeared EeeUser contains information about most of these. Some distributions are better configured to make use of the small 7″ screen and unusual hardware present within (such as the wifi card) the EeePC.
Mandriva Linux install is very simple and the OS works well, however I was unable to configure an encrypted home folder using Mandriva. So I switched to a customised Ubuntu distribution called Ubuntu-eee (now known as Easy Peasy – don’t know why). This generally worked well but wifi was temperamental and USB_PERSIST support was missing.
Finally, I tried Eeebuntu 2 and after installing both Base and NBR (NetBook Remix) versions I opted to use Base which included everything needed to get started installing applications that I needed and allowed me to install only those applications that I actually needed.
My Asus EeePC now runs the following software:
- Eeebuntu 2.0 Base
- OpenOffice 3
- Firefox 3 – Web Browser
- Thunderbird – Email Client
- Pidgin – Instant Messaging Client
- Picasa 3 – Google’s excellent photo organiser
- F-Spot – Photo organiser – useful for uploading to Gallery2
- GIMP – Image Editor
- FireFTP – Firefox add-in – FTP Client
- Cups-PDF – PDF printing
- Dropbox – File Synchronisation
- Stellarium – useful to star gazing
- Apache, PHP & MySQL – for web site development and testing
- Totem – video player
- Banshee – iTunes like audio player
- Audacity – Easy to use sound editor
- LocalePurge – removal all unnecessary language files and free up valuable storage space.
- Wine – run windows applications within Linux!