Partitioning

Here's how I opted to format the 4GB SSD on my Eee.

The main thing of interest here is that tiny little partition at the end. That's an EFI partition which is required to use the BootBooster feature which lets the BIOS skip the POST every time you turn the machine on. The Eee comes with this set up out of the box, however, none of the netbook installers create this for you if you re-partition the drive. Without this, the Eee requires a few extra seconds to boot up.

I found the directions for how to set this up stashed away on the Ubuntu site. The nice graphical tools don't even know anything about this kind of partition, so you have to use old-fashioned fdisk to do it. I just switched to the console (Ctrl-Alt-F1) from the UNR installer to create this, then rebooted and re-ran the installer no rmally.

Using the graphical partition manager, I allocated all the remaining space to one big ext4 partition. Note that I did not create a swap partition. The 900a's 1 GB of RAM is more than adequate for anything I am likely to do on a netbook, enough to run without any swap. With only 4 GB of storage, we need to conserve every bit we can, so using any of this on a swap partition is just a waste.

The grub that ships with Ubuntu 9.04 boots to ext4 with no problems!

I'm also putting /tmp on RAM disk. The SSD that ships with this thing is pretty slow. I just added the following line to /etc/fstab :

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

Distro rundown

I played a bit with the custom Asus version of Xandros. Within hours, I blew it away to install a real Linux distro. I tried out a few. Here's my summary of my experiences.

I actually installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix first. It was pretty slick, but I wanted to see what else was out there.

Moblin

Moblin, formerly an Intel initiative and now developed by the Linux Foundation itself, is a distro designed from the ground up with the single purpose of running on Intel Atom netbooks. I used ddto write the latest beta image onto a 1 GB USB flash drive as directed. Install was pretty painless and straightforward.

The thing that is really impressive about Moblin is just how fast it boots. The stated goal of the Moblin project is power-on to user interface in under five seconds, and this is about right. There's no messing with suspend or hibernation or anything. You don't need them when you can push the power button and the machine boots and shuts down this quickly.

The UI is very consumer-friendly and unlike anything I've experienced. It eschews the traditional desktop paradigm. It's not quite as complicated as what you'd find on a smartphone, either. It's very inuitive. The little animations as you navigate the interface are slick. The media manager uses a novel visual drill-down paradigm.

The art assets that come installed are quite a bit more polished than one typically associates with Linux. Stylish, professional photographs as wallpapers.  The art assets that come installed are quite a bit more polished than one typically associates with Linux. The sample media that comes with most Linux distros is frequently, well, less than compelling, so I was impressed at the discretion that went into selecting free media. I watched the included Big Buck Bunny, a cute Pixar-quality animation that was produced with open-source tools. Moblin also bundles some nice jazz music, which just happens to sound pretty nice over the Eee's otherwise wimpy speakers. And, um, there were some photos of kittens or something.

Unfortunately, Moblin is clearly still under development. Hardware support was a little flaky. Sometimes the sound or wireless networking just didn't work, and needed a reboot to get it to work properly. The integrated social networking features currently support only Twitter and last.fm. The framework is in place to install optional applications, but there aren't any of these in the repositories yet, just the core Moblin distribution.

I concluded that Moblin has some extreme potential, not just as a netbook distro, but as a new user-friendly application of computing. But it's not yet ready for me to rely on day-to-day.

Kubuntu 9.04, LPIA build

I'm aware that Dell's netbooks are shipping with binaries optimized for the Atom, or "low-power Intel architecture." However, as of Jaunty, Ubuntu does not distribute the Netbook Remix image in LPIA flavor, they only build for generic i386. I did manage to find LPIA ISO images, though. Theoretically, these should have been convertable to a bootable USB flash drive with unetbootin. However, something about the Jaunty installer actually probes for physical CD-ROM and throws up an error. I was not able to trick this process into just treating the flash drive as the installation media.

What I did manage to get to work was getting the netinstall image to load. I plugged in an Ethernet cable and had to download and install the base packages from the net. Then I booted into the system, pointed the apt config to point at the files I had already downloaded on the USB key, and ran tasksel to install the Kubuntu distribution. I'm not going to bother recalling the details of how I did this, as it was a major time-consuming pain in the ass and I don't recommend it.

Anyway, I booted into my new KDE desktop. It loaded up rather slower than I would have liked. I soon discovered a problem. My roundabout, non-standard installation procedure didn't actually set my default user up as a sudoer, meaning I couldn't actually perform necessary system administration tasks. At this point I had to boot into recovery mode to add myself to /etc/sudoers(Ubuntu still requires visudo? Really?) but it occurred to me that if this basic thing was not set up, then a number of other things might be broken too.

I wrote the whole thing off as a wasted effort. I run KDE on my desktop, and I generally prefer the KDE version of tools over GNOME, so I'd have like to have had the envy-inspiringly beautiful KDE 4.3 desktop on my netbook, too. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to actually install it, though. Hopefully in the future there will be a KDE-based distro that is optimized for netbook installation.

Easy Peasy

Easy Peasy is an Ubuntu derivative that is optimized to run on netbooks. It includes a number of frequently-installed non-free applications, like Flash, Java, and Skype, out of the box, instead of their free equivalents. It has nicer icons than Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and a nice blue theme instead of all that orange.

Somewhat ironically, then, Easy Peasy ended up being harder to install than Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It doesn't come in a USB-ready disk image, instead it only comes as an ISO image. When I used the Debian version of unetbootinto make the USB disk, it would not boot properly. I even upgraded to the newest build of unetbootinin experimental, but with no luck. I resorted to going to a Windows XP machine and using the Win32 binary of unetbootin to make the install disc. This, it turned out, worked correctly. I installed Easy Peasy, and it worked pretty well.

The latest Easy Peasy, however, is based on Ubuntu 8.10, and thus does not support installation to the new ext4 filesystem. I was pretty set on having my netbook's SSD formatted in ext4, as it has been posting pretty amazing benchmarks for SSD performance.

Easy Peasy appears to be a one-man effort and, predictably, appears to be showing some neglect recently. The new release, promising Firefox 3.5 and Compiz effects in Netbook Launcher mode, was supposedly due out last month and still hasn't turned up. It doesn't have anywhere near the user community as Ubuntu, ergo its wiki and such are less useful resources.

Easy Peasy has some good ideas. I'll take the time to implement a number of these with UNR.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04

I ended up going with UNR. While it is not quite perfect out of the box yet, Ubuntu has a large number of community support resources, which will allow me to set up my Eee exactly the way I want it.

I'll probably test and consider a reinstallation with the release of UNR 9.10, Easy Peasy 1.5, Moblin non-beta, and Debian Squeeze.