When I first wrote about EeeDora, a custom version of Fedora designed for the Eee PC, I hadn't taken the time to try installing it yet. But this afternoon I took the plunge, and I'm awfully glad I did.

A little while back I decided to install a full version of Ubuntu on my Eee PC to see if it was easier to use/more familiar than eeeXubuntu. On the one hand, you get a more powerful set of applications with Ubuntu running the GNOME desktop environment than you do with Xubuntu's XFCE desktop environment. But on the other hand, Ubuntu seemed a bit more sluggish on my Eee PC than eeeXubuntu. So I figured I'd reinstall eeeXubuntu. But first, I decided to take a closer look at EeeDora, which appears to have come a long way in the last few months.

You can install EeeDora using a liveCD or a USB flash drive. Since I don't have an external CD-ROM drive for my Eee PC, I chose the latter method. I followed a set of instructions found on the EeeUser Wiki for configuring a flash drive using Windows. There are also instructions for setting up a flash drive using Fedora or another Linux distro.

Booting from the LiveUSB took just about a minute, which is pretty impressive. It takes closer to 6 minutes to boot Ubuntu from a LiveUSB.

Once Eeedora is up and running, almost everything works just as you'd expect. The keyboard shortcuts all seem to work. That means you can adjust the brightness, volume, wireless card, and even the external monitor settings with little trouble. Once I toggled the WiFi I was online. But you can also pull up the WiFi Radar program from the start menu if you need to find your wireless network.

There's not a lot of software installed by default. You've got Firefox, MousePad, and some system tools, but that's about it. You can add more programs using the add/remove software utility, but your settings won't be saved since this is a LiveUSB. In order to save your settings, you'll need to install EeeDora to your solid state disk or a SD/SDHC card.

I had a heck of a time figuring out how to install EeeDora to an SD card until I found a set of instructions at the EeeUser forums. Once I finally loaded EeeDora onto my SD card (note: installation takes somewhere around 90 minutes), I figured I was home free. But it turns out that some of the things which worked perfectly from the LiveUSB weren't working. For example, no matter how many times I clicked on the add/remove software button, nothing happened. Or rather, the first time I clicked, I was asked for a password. But then the package manager should have opened, and it didn't. Since EeeDora comes with very few programs preloaded, that was a bit of a problem.

Figuring something might have gone wrong during the installation process, I decided to reinstall the OS. This time, it took over two hours and hung at the end on a screen that said it was doing some post-installation formatting. This screen said it would take a few minutes. After about 45 I gave up and shut down my Eee.

As much as I want to like EeeDora, I'm not sure it's ready for prime time just yet. Or maybe I'm only encountering these problems because I'm trying to install it to an SD card instead of the main memory. But I'm not ready to overwrite Windows XP just yet. It took me too long to get it on there.

I might give EeeDora one more try tomorrow before reinstalling eeeXubuntu. But at the very least, it's nice to know that there's a Linux distro that you can run as a LiveUSB from any disk with 340MB of storage space. If you ever find yourself with an unbootable computer, this is the sort of thing that can come in handy.

Looking for a super-light weight Linux distribution to slap on your Eee PC? Eee Linux OS weighs in at just 477MB, which means you can fit it on a flash drive or install it on your Eee PC and still have 3.5GB of memory free. In fact, it might even be small enough to dual boot with Xandros.

You won't get all the goodies that come with a full fledged distro like Ubuntu or Gentoo. But Eee Linux OS is based on Debian, so you can tweak it to your heart's content and add all the software and packages you need.

Right now, the core components are the XFCE desktop manager, drivers for the Eee's hardware (including the webcam and WiFi cards), a web browser and email client. No screenshots are available at the moment, and after my marathon session playing with eeeXubuntu and installing Windows Vista SP1 RC on my other PC last night, I don't have the energy to check out Eee Linux OS for myself yet. If anyone's tried it and wants to share their results, please leave a comment.

So it turns out that that there's a way to boot a live Ubuntu environment from a USB flash disk without spending six minutes waiting for your Eee PC to be ready. OasisBob over at EeeUser has put together a handy little Xubuntu LiveCD designed specifically for Eee PC users. Basically, its just a regular Xubuntu installation disc/LiveCD, but with a few Eee friendly tweaks like:

• Adjustments for the low resolution desktop
• Native WiFi drivers
• WLAN support

In other words, once you boot EeeXubuntu you should be able to get online within a matter of seconds, making EeeXubuntu almost as easy to use as the Xandros environment that ships with the Eee PC.

Although the Eee PC is more than capable of handling the Gnome desktop environment that ships with the standard version of Ubuntu, Xubuntu uses the light weight XFCE interface which should stress the Eee's resources a bit less. But make no mistake, under the hood, this is still Ubuntu. For example, you can still access all the same software and OS updates using the Synaptic package manager and Ubuntu repositories.

Now, the astute reader will note that I said this is a LiveCD, but the Eee PC doesn't have a CD drive. If you happen to have a USB CD drive, you could pop the disc in, plug the drive into your Eee, hit Esc when the boot screen pops up, and select your external drive.

But if you don't have a USB CD drive, here's how you load eeeXubuntu onto a USB flash drive. Just pop the CD into your PC. It doesn't matter if you're running Windows or Linux or something else altogether. Reboot your computer and make sure to boot from the CD drive. A few moments later, you'll be running Xubuntu. Now all you have to do is plug in your flash drive, follow the steps on the download page, and in about two minutes you'll have eeeXubuntu loaded onto a flash drive.

When you're done, just unmount the flash drive, plug it into your Eee PC, and hit the Esc key during when the boot screen pops up to select your boot device. A little over 90 seconds later, you'll be running Xubuntu on your Eee PC.

If you want, you can click the install button on your desktop to load Xubuntu onto your main memory. Make sure you know what you're doing if you go this route, as you will wind up erasing Xandros. You can also choose to install Xubuntu to an SDHC card or another flash drive, but to be honest I haven't had much success with that yet.

I'm impressed enough with eeeXubuntu that I'm seriously thinking about replacing Xandros. But I'm not quite ready to make the jump yet. And eeeXubuntu is still a work in progress, so odds are if I wait a few days things will only get better.

Update: eeeXubuntu r3 is out, now with better support for the Eee PC's Fn keys.