Everybody and their third cousin twice removed seems to be jumping into the low cost subnotebook field these days. The latest entry is Norhtec's Gecko Laptop. The laptop will reportedly cost less than $300, and will sport a 1GHz VIA processor and Linpux Linux Lite, a custom distro designed for devices with small screens. I checked out Linupus Lite a few weeks ago, and it seems to closely resemble the Easy Mode version of Xandros that Asus installs on the Eee PC.


The Gecko is aimed at developing markets, as are the XO Laptop and Intel's Classmate PC. But I think Asus's success at marketing the Eee PC to developing nations has shown that that there is a market for low cost, underpowered devices everywhere. Hopefully we'll see a slightly higher priced Gecko Laptop in Europe, the US, and other developed regions at some point.

[via Desktop Linux]

While Eee PC enthusiasts have done a great job of tweaking popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora to work properly on the tiny laptop, the folks behind Mandriva have decided to build Eee support directly into the main branch of their next release. Mandriva 2008.1 is designed to work with the Eee PC out of the box. There's no need to tweak any config files or run any scripts to get the WiFi, webcam, or any other hardware working.

Mandriva 2008.1 will be launched in April. You can either install the operating system on an Eee PC with a USB CD/DVD-ROM drive, or you can download the installer to your device and install it from within Windows or Linux.

[via Eee PC.Net]

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.

While I wouldn't recommend installing Windows Vista on an Eee PC (because it requires a huge amount of memory and storage space), the Eee PC is a full fledged computer capable of running pretty much any operating system. And while I've primarily spent my time installing and customizing Windows XP and various Linux distributions, you can also get Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard up and running.

TigerOnEeePC is a great resource with information on installing and configuring OS X 10.4 Tiger on the Eee PC. A quick warning before you get started: the instructions ask you to download an illegal disc image with OS X. I would only recommend doing this if you've already paid for a licensed copy of the operating system. And even then, this is technically a violation of Apple's terms of service. So proceed at your own risk.

Running OS X on a PC designed for Windows or Linux used to be a pretty cumbersome process, but now that Macs use Intel processors and are capable of running Windows via Boot Camp, it's a lot easier than it used to be. For the most part, once you have the install disc and a USB DVD-ROM drive, you can probably figure out the rest yourself. But I'd recommend following the TigerOnEeePC instructions to make sure you minimize the read/write cycles on the solid state disk and avoid some possible problems.

In the end, as you can see in the video above, OS X runs reasonably well on the underpowered Eee PC. Animations are a bit slow, and oddly they seem even slower if you customize your Eee PC to run at 900MHz instead of 630MHz. Which is good, because at 630MHz, you'll likely get about 2.5 hours of battery life. I'd hate to see what it would be if you were running at 900MHz.

The other thing to note is that while WiFi works properly, there's no support for Ethernet. So if you need to plug your Eee PC into a wired network, you might want to stick with Linux or Windows for now.

[via Digg]

EeeXubuntu developer oasisbob has released the third version of his custom Ubuntu distribution for the Eee PC. The main improvements in eeeXubuntu r3 are support for additional Fn hotkeys. In r2, you could use the Fn keys to adjust the brightness, but that was about it. Now everything except for the WiFi toggle switch seems to work. Oasisbob has also made it easier to create a bootable flash drive from the live CD.

If you're already running eeeXubuntu r2, you can upgrade to r3. But be forewarned, the upgrade process has not been thoroughly tested, and you could wind up messing up your system.

For more info about installing eeeXubuntu, or info on what works and what doesn't, check out the eeeuser wiki.

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.

For some reason, the first thing some people want to do when they get an Eee PC is scrap the built in operating system and install something different. This is hardly surprising, as Asus included instructions (and drivers) for installing Windows XP, but as a full fledged, if undersized PC, the Eee PC is capable of running practically any operating system, from Mac OS X to hundreds of flavors of Linux.

These days Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu may be all the rage, but some people prefer Red Hat and its non-commercial cousin Fedora. So one new Eee owner decided to create a custom version of Fedora that will run on the Eee PC. He calls it EeeDora.

Right now EeeDora is still in its infancy. You can download EeeDora and throw it on a USB flash drive or CD and use it as a LiveCD or you can install EeeDora, replacing Xandros or whatever other operating system is currently installed on your Eee PC.

But EeeDora's not exactly ready for prime time yet. A number of pretty basic features aren't working yet. For example, the developer hasn't managed to get audio to play yet, the wireless card doesn't work, and you have to do a little bit of work to get the wired ethernet working.

Still, variety is the spice of life, and it's exciting to see someone focusing on an Eee-specific operating system. While you can run Ubuntu, Windows XP, and other operating systems on the Eee PC, they aren't really designed for its low screen resolution and small storage drive. EeeDora, on the other hand, weighs in at just 380MB as a liveCD. I'm not sure if that means a complete install only eats up 380MB of your SSD space. I'm guessing it would eat up a bit more storage space, but far less than the 2+ GB that Xandros uses.

Last weekend I reinstalled Windows Vista on my Toshiba A135-4527 laptop. Or rather, I used the system restore discs that came with the notebook to restore my PC to its factory default settings. But that didn't solve the glitches I was hearing when playing and recording audio.

So today I decided to install Windows XP. Of course, if you want to create a dual boot system, the experts will usually tell you to install your Windows operating systems in reverse chronological order. That's because while Vista recognizes the boot manager for XP, Windows XP will not recognize Vista's. That makes sense, because Vista wasn't around when XP was released.

But what that means is that if you've already got Vista installed, you'd better make sure you have your Vista installation disc handy if you plan on installing Windows XP without eliminating Vista. Because otherwise, you'll find that you can only boot into Windows XP once it's installed. Fortunately, the fix is as simple as putting your Vista installation disc in the drive, rebooting, and using the startup repair tool.

Once I decided that what I really wanted was a triple boot system, with Vista, XP, and Ubuntu 7.10, I went ahead and repartitioned my hard drive to accommodate three operating systems and a shared partition for storing files. My plan was to install XP, then Vista, then Ubuntu. But when I got to Vista, it wanted to overwrite XP. I assume this is because I was using a system restore disc, and not a standalone Vista disc. So all in all, I've done 4 complete operating system installations today.

I suspect I'll spend most of my time using XP, but I wanted to keep Vista around in case a future Windows Update fixes my audio problems. Also, since I write about software, it's nice to have the newest version of Windows handy in case I want to check out any applications that don't work with XP.

I like Ubuntu, but there are a few problems that keep me from using it full time. First, the audio drivers for the Toshiba A135 series are a bit... nonexistent. While there are a bunch of posts on the Ubuntu forums from users who have come up with workarounds, they're a bit of a pain to follow. I've managed to get audio to play in Ubuntu, but the headphone jack doesn't work at the moment. And second, there's no user-friendly way to synchronize my Windows Mobile PDA with Evolution, Thunderbird, or other PIM applications. I've tried using SynCE and MultiSync, but I just can't quite get things configured properly.

And while the Toshiba A135-4527 was designed to run Vista, XP runs like a dream. It boots about 1000% faster than Windows Vista, the audio is glitch-free, and overall the OS is much more responsive than Vista. There's no support for some of the hardware buttons (like the keys that dim the screen brightness or control media playback), but that's a small price to pay.

You will need to install some drivers manually. Not only did I have problems getting the WiFi adapter to work when I first loaded XP, but I couldn't even get the LAN card working. But it turns out I'm not the first person to try loading Windows XP on this model of notebook. Someone has been kind enough to post a file on RapidShare containing pretty much every single drive you'll need to configure the audio, wireless, ethernet, and other hadware.

I do kind of miss some of Vista's eye-candy. And I'd gotten kind of used to being able to launch programs just by typing their names into the start menu. But Google Desktop and Launchy are pretty decent replacements.

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.