I'm going to let you in on a little secret. You can use any SD/SDHC/MMC card with the Eee PC. And you can plug any USB flash drive into the USB port too. But if you want to spend your money on flash memory cards or drives designed for the Eee PC, A-DATA wants to help.

The company has announced Eee-branded SDHC memory cards and S70i USB flash drives. Basically the only thing differentiating these memory devices from other A-DATA products is the fact that they're white, and they have an Eee PC logo on the packaging. No word on how much these super special memory devices will cost. But I think it's fair to say they probably won't be worth the price.

[via Eee PC Blog]

Now that I've got eeeXubuntu installed on my 4GB SD card, I figured I might as well try installing Windows XP on my Eee PC's main memory. After all, even if I royally mess things up, there's zero chance of ending up with an unbootable machine unless I lose my SD card.

But there are just two problems:

1. I don't want Windows XP to eat up more than half of my computer's solid state disk
2. I don't have a USB CD/DVD-ROM drive

Either one of these alone wouldn't pose much of a problem. You can slim down your Windows XP installation using nLite. Or if you want to install a full system by copying data from your XP DVD to a USB flash drive, you can follow some relatively simple instructions from Eee PC Tutorials. But try using those instructions to install an nLited copy of XP and you could be in for a world of headache.

While it's possible to install Windows XP onto an SDHC card or a USB flash drive, odds are your Eee PC won't be happy running XP that way. Windows will boot faster and have fewer driver issues if you install it on your built-in memory. But in order to do that, you'll have to wipe out the cutsom Xandros distribution that comes with your Eee PC. You can always restore it using the restore DVD. But that doesn't help if you want to be able to switch back and forth between Xandros and Windows without losing data.

AaronL at the Eee User forums reports that he's found another solution: move your Xandros installation onto a flash drive. The process isn't for the feint of heart. For example, it involves rebuilding your kernel. But the end result is a working Eee PC that can run Windows from the internal solid state disk and Xandros from a USB flash drive. AaronL says it does take longer to boot from an external flash drive, so say goodbye to your 20 second startup times. But just think how impressed your friends will be when you show them that you can dual boot a tiny PC with just 4GB of internal storage space. (Your friends really need to get a life. Or maybe I do).

Well, my foray into the world of Puppy Linux was short and sweet. But since I couldn't get the audio drivers working, I decided to move on.

The folks at Pendrivelinux.com have some incredibly simple tutorials for loading Knoppix, Slax, DSL, Gentoo, and Ubuntu onto USB flash drives. Since I've spent some time with Ubuntu on my primarily laptop, I figured I'd give it a whirl on my tiny new laptop.

If you've got an Ubuntu installation CD lying around, you can have your flash drive configured in a matter of minutes. All you have to do is format the drive, copy some files, and follow a few other arcane commands.

Once Ubuntu is running on the Eee PC, it's actually pretty snappy and responsive. But it takes a good six minutes to boot up. This probably has something to do with the fact that I'm essentially running a LiveCD off of a storage device instead of installing Ubuntu into main memory. Anyway, the slow boot time, and the fact that I can't get the wireless driver to work (even after following the directions for configuring ndiswrapper on the EeeUser wiki), make me think I should have stuck with Puppy.

But the truth of the matter is there's nothing wrong with the Xandros distribution that ships with the Eee PC (other than the fact that you have a lot of out of date packages like Firefox 2.0.0.3 and OpenOffice.org 2.0). So while I'll probably keep tinkering with alternate operating systems, it's only because I'm a glutton for punishment.

With all this talk of people installing Mac OS X, Windows XP, and even Windows Vista on the Eee PC, I figured I had to get in on some of this alternate OS action. But I don't have a USB DVD drive, and more importantly, I don't really want to mess with the Xandros operating system that comes with the Eee PC, which for the most part I love.

So I decided to give my Eee some puppy love. Puppy Linux, that is. Puppy is a tiny Linux distribution that fits on a flash drive, and can be booted from a flash drive. It's sort of like a LiveCD, in that you can run it from any PC without writing anything to the PC's hard drive. But since you're running the OS off of flash memory and not a CD, you can save data.

All you need to do is download the Puppy ISO and burn it to a CD, reboot your PC running Puppy, and then use Puppy's universal installer to install Puppy onto a flash drive. Then you slap the flash drive into your Eee PC, hit Esc when booting up, and select the drive you want to boot from. You can find more detailed directions here.

Everything worked like a charm. Well, almost everything. There's no sound, and there's no way I would have figured out how to configure the wireless drivers on my own. Luckily, the Eee User forum came to the rescue again. In a nutshell, you need to grab the "net5211.inf" file from the DVD that came with your Eee PC and load it onto your flash drive. You can find the file in the /Drivers/Wireless/ndis5x/ directory.

Then you need to find "BootManager configure bootup" in the Puppy start menu, select blacklist, and add ATH_PCI and ATH_Hal to your blacklist. Oh yeah, and you can only do this after you've rebooted Puppy once and created a save file.

Once you've added those items to your blacklist, reboot again, then select the "Connect" icon on the desktop. Go to load module, and click the more tab. Choose NDISWrapper, and browse to wherever you put your net5211.inf file. Now you should be able to configure your wireless settings.

As for the audio, I haven't found a way to make that work yet.

After playing with Puppy for a while last night, I decided to try a different version today, so i went with Fire Hydrant, a custom version of Puppy. I like the graphics a bit better, and it comes with Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird instead of SeaMonkey.

I haven't run any thorough benchmarking, but Puppy seems a bit quicker and more responsive than Xandros on the Eee PC. Programs load in the blink of an eye and Firefox runs like nobody's business. Although the Adobe Flash player plugin seems up to the task of YouTube videos, it must be a bit older than the version Asus includes, because while Firefox can handle Hulu videos under Xandros, the version that comes with Fire Hydrant doesn't seem to like Hulu.

All in all, I'll probably stick with Xandros for my day to day tasks. But it's nice to have choices.