When Asus first announced it was developing the Eee PC, the company said there would be two ways to use the device. First was an innovative new "easy mode" that would replace the typical start menu with six easy to use tabs labeled internet, work, learn, play, settings, and favorites. And for more advanced users, there would be a full KDE-based desktop.
But now that the Eee PC is shipping, it looks like Asus has disabled the full desktop mode. Sort of. It turns out that you can toggle back and forth between easy and full desktop modes, but you need to install a few packages first. This isn't very advanced hacking. You don't need to add any repositories, for example.
The folks at EeeUser have been working on this problem for the last few days, and user Kiteless has written up the easiest to follow tutorial I've seen so far. To make it even simpler, I'm going to skip a few of his steps.
- Press Ctrl+Alt+T to bring up a terminal
- Type "sudo bash" to gain root access
- Type "apt-get update" to make sure you download the most up to date packages
- Type "apt-get install kicker" and answer "y" when asked if you want to install
- Type "apt-get install ksmserver" and answer "y" when asked if you want to install
- Type exit twice to leave the terminal
Select Full Desktop and your system will reboot into a complete KDE environment. Unsupported applications you've installed will show up in the start menu. And you'll have access to more advanced utilities, like the Control Center:
Best of all, the upgrade only eats a few MB of memory. I had tried doing something similar earlier, but it ate up a few hundred MB. I think that's because I had an alternate Debian repository enabled, so kicker and ksmserver may have tried to download far more packages than I needed.Note that when you power up your system, you will always boot into easy mode. But it takes just a few seconds to change into full desktop mode.
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