I finally broke down and got myself an Asus eeePC 8G. I actually got it last week. I tries the Xandros Operating system that came with it for about 30 minutes and decided I wanted to be able to do more so I converted it to the advance desktop by following the instructions found here. After a day with Xandros advance desktop, I decided to switch to eeeXubuntu. I read several places that there were no updates available for the Xandros version on the eeePC, so I went with an Ubuntu derivative since I am well versed with Ubuntu. If you need help install eeeXubuntu there is a great how to at eeeuser.com.
The first day I had eeeXubuntu I decided that I would try Compiz-fusion to get all the effects. I don’t know what I did wrong but I lost all my borders and after playing with it for a few hours I got rid of the effects and back to the plain-jane XFCE desktop. Everything works fine with eeeXubuntu after the user does a few tweaks.
The last few days I have been reading that Mandriva 2008.1 has complete eeePC support out of the box. So today I decided to switch to Mandriva. I have no USB DVD/CD drive therefore I have to do a network install. Mandriva has instructions here and so does eeeUser. I decided to go with the KDE desktop and I am installing it over the internet. My internet speed is fast 5 Mbps but it is still going to take hours for the install.
Once the install is done I will have to trim it done by getting rid of application I will not use or cannot use like k3b the burning application. I had some misgiving about installing Mandriva because it uses rpm packages and I did have dependencies problems in the past. That was the main reason why I switched to Ubuntu from openSuse almost two years ago. I am a glutton for punishment.
It has been one hour since I started the install and according to the install window on the eeePC I still have to wait 2hrs and 43min before the install is done. I don’t think it’ll take that long, but what do I know? I leave on this note and I will post the results when the install is done.
[...] spurius @ 12:02 am I finished the internet install of Mandriva 2008.1 on my eeePC. I ended the last post with 2hrs and 43 minutes left in the install of Mandriva according to the GUI. I think that I [...]