So you've manage to take your Eee PC apart in the hopes of installing some extra memory, a Bluetooth adapter, or some some other tidbits. But what exactly are you looking at? Fortunately one Eee owner with an eye for color has created a couple of pretty pictures of the Eee PC mainboard and posted them to a wiki documenting his Eee tweaks.

The color coded images make it easy to find your processor, graphics controller, PCIe slot, and other Eee bits. Now start soldering away.

[via Asus Eee Hacks]

One problem with the Asus Eee PC's non-standard 800 x 480 pixel screen is that some applications just don't fit on the screen. For example, sometimes when you go to add programs using the Synaptic Package Manager, the "OK" button will actually pop up below the taskbar, where you can't easily get to it. Or when you install a Firefox add-on with a particularly long list of customizable preferences, you might not be able to click all of the check boxes.

Up until yesterday, my solution was to plug in an external monitor with a higher resolution whenever I needed to see what was on those windows. This works fine if all you're doing is installing and customizing programs. How often do you need to do that when you're out at a coffee shop?

But Digital Home reader Aaron sent in a much easier solution: Hold down the Alt button and then click anywhere on the window you want to move and you can drag it around the screen.

This works better than just clicking the top of the window to drag. You'll notice that when you do this, the bottom of your window will still look cut off, but you can fix that by moving your mouse over to the edge of the window to resize it.

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.

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T to bring up a terminal
2. Type "sudo bash" to gain root access
3. Type "apt-get update" to make sure you download the most up to date packages
4. Type "apt-get install kicker" and answer "y" when asked if you want to install
   
5. Type "apt-get install ksmserver" and answer "y" when asked if you want to install
6. Type exit twice to leave the terminal

When you hit the power button, you'll notice a new option that says Full Desktop next to Task Manager.

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.

Related posts:

• Unboxing the Asus Eee PC
• Add a start menu to the Asus Eee PC in easy mode
• Photos of the Eee PC next to other stuff
• Installing Audacity on the Eee PC
  

One of the best and worst things about the Eee PC is its "easy mode" user interface. In easy mode, you have no start menu, and little ability to access some of the Eee PC's more advanced features (unless you know your way around a terminal, which you can pull up by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T).

If you like to customize your desktop, easy mode can be pretty frustrating. On the other hand, everything is well designed to fit on the Eee PC's 800 x 480 pixel monitor. (Well, almost everything. Every now and again a menu will pop up that you just can't edit properly because it extends below the screen. But we'll get to that in another post). And restricting access to some of the more advanced features is probably a good thing for many users who aren't familiar with Linux.

It turns out there is a pretty simple way to enable a full KDE desktop, but if you want the best of both worlds, you can also add customizable start menu to your easy mode interface. Somewhat ironically, this might be harder than enabling the full desktop.

Following the tips at Notebook Review I was able to create a start menu by doing the following:

• Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T
• Type "sudo bash" to get root access
• Create a hidden folder by typing "mkdir /home/user/.icewm"
• Copy a config file to it by typing cp /etc/X11/icewm/preferences /home/user/.icewm/"
• Type "nano /home/user/.icewm/preferences" to open an editor
• Scroll down until you find "TaskBarShowStartMenu," and change the 0 to 1
• Hit Ctrl+x to exit
• Next time you reboot or restart your X server by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace you will have a shiny new start menu

There's just one problem. It's mostly empty. Fortunately the folks at EeeUser have some suggestions for populating it by editing the menu file.

First, you need to copy "menu" from /etc/X11/icewm/ to /home/user/.icewm/. You can either do this using the method above, or using the File Manager. But in order to see all the directories and files in file manager, you'll have to select "Show Hidden Files" and "Show All File Systems" from the View tab.

Now go ahead and open menu using the nano command, or by clicking it in the file manager. Now you can edit the menu by adding programs you've installed and removing applications you don't use or which aren't actually available.

In general, the format for a new entry is: prog "title" icon_name program_options

For example: prog Audacity audacity

If you want more examples and tips, I highly recommend checking out the frequently updated EeeUser wiki.