Finally got around to nuking the original Xandros OS on my Asus Eee PC 900 and installing Ubuntu NBR (Netbook Remix) 9.04 this morning. I was never too crazy about the Xandros Linux distro on the 900 (no firewall, no support for encrypted partitions, et cetera), but I was afraid to break WiFi or audio or something else, so I stuck with it for a year. Pretty lame of Asus not to offer an upgrade path for us early adopters.
I love the Netbook form factor for web surfing on the couch and for working while on travel. The Asus Eee PC 900 was the first 9" (well, at least 8.9") Netbook to hit the market a year ago. I had it on preorder on Amazon. As soon as there's a 10" Netbook weighing in at less than 1 kg, I'll buy it. I'm OK with a 9" screen, but the keyboard is just a bit too small for several hours of typing. I bought an Asus Eee PC 1000HA and an Acer Aspire One AOD150-1165 for two relatives a couple of months ago. Both have 10" screens (and bigger keyboards) and high-capacity batteries. I hear the 1000HA battery falls way short of expectations, but the Acer gets close to the promised 8-9 hours of battery life. They both have 160GB hardrives and weigh in at around 1.4 kg, a little bit heavy for my taste.
It was a fairly painless process to install Ubuntu NBR 9.04 on my old Asus Eee PC 900. The instructions on this page were quite helpful. I downloaded a USB image and put it on an old SanDisk Cruzer Freedom 1GB USB flash drive.
Booted the Eee from the USB flash drive by pressing Esc and choosing it from the from the three available volumes in the menu. Took it for a quick spin before I installed it to the internal flash drives. Only problem was that the Netbook Launcher was really sluggish. Some quick googling revealed that this is a known bug, fortunately with a workaround. I found a modified kernel that worked like a charm so far.
I vaguely remembered that the ext2 filesystem with the noatime mount option is supposed to give you better performance and longer lifetime for old flash drives ("Gen Zero Solid-State Drives"), like the ones in the Eee PC 900. Found some support for that folklore on this blog (the comments were probably even more informative than the blog post itself). Seems there's now a new relatime mount option that's the default, this other blog had a lengthier comparison of noatime and relatime. So I chose ext2 instead of the default ext3 filesystem in the Ubuntu installer, but after the install I modified /etc/fstab to use noatime instead of relatime to minimize the writes to the el-cheapo internal flash drives. Hopefully they'll now survive for another year or two.
Downloaded the latest modified kernel (linux-image-2.6.28-11-generic_2.6.28-11.38lp349314apw1_i386.deb, with its header files linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic_2.6.28-11.38lp349314apw1_i386.deb as of this writing) and installed with "sudo dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.28-11-generic_2.6.28-11.38lp349314apw1_i386.deb && sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic_2.6.28-11.38lp349314apw1_i386.deb". Fired up the Synaptic GUI frontend to the apt package manager and marked the modified kernel and its header files as locked packages, so they won't get overwritten by the next kernel update. Hopefully the default kernel will get the bug fix soon.
Ubuntu still has the firewall off by default for some reason. Nowadays it's trivial to turn on with reasonable rules simply by typing "sudo ufw enable", but it would be nice if the installer did that for you.
Have been using Ubuntu on my primary work laptop for three years now and it worked pretty well. With me getting older and lazier, I'll probably choose the path of least resistance and stick with Ubuntu on all my computers, unless they really start to suck...
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