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nothing wrong with the Xandros distribution that ships with the Eee PC (other than the fact that you have a lot of out of date packages like Firefox 2.0.0.3 and OpenOffice.org 2.0).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.