[TriLUG] eee reflections

[Tom Roche]

<disclaimer: noob/>

Alan Porter Sat Apr 26 14:44:50 EDT 2008 (rearranged)
 > The eee's default Xandros-based distro

what I'm calling eeeXandros

 > is not quite as crippled as you let on.

Yeah, "crippleware" is unfair; truly

 > It boots fast

and shuts down fast. OTOH,

* eeeXandros never seems to find my wireless connection automagically,
   while eeeXubuntu nearly always does.

* the touchpad definitely works better for me in eeeXubuntu.

But

 > [eeeXandros] has ifconfig. It's in /sbin, which is probably not in
 > your path by default.

Doh! Indeed. Thanks to eeeXubuntu for putting it in my path. However
...

 > If you add the Xandros repositories to your sources.list, you can
 > get pretty much whatever you want.

... there's a fair number of reports on eeeuser.com of conflicts
between stock debian packages and xandros ones. I'm unqualified to
judge the merit of those claims, but I can verify that I broke both my
easy and advanced desktops (notably couldn't standby, other lesser
weirdnesses) by adding some networking packages with synaptic--hadta
burn the restore CD to USB (since I don't have an external USB) and
restore to factory. Whether that's due more to cluelessness than
xandros is open to question :-) but I can also say that I've done a
lot of {apt-get, RPM, yum} on other distros without whacking anything.

 > [eeeXandros] downsides:

 > (1) They format the SSD as two partitions: a read-only "factory"
 > partition and a read-write "user" partition. These are mounted using
 > unionfs. It's great if you want to revert to factory defaults, but
 > it stinks if you want to do "apt-get dist-upgrade". When I tried
 > that, I was left with only 500MB of the original 4GB flash free.
 > That's because any updated packages are effectively stored twice:
 > the original copy in the factory partition and the updated copy in
 > the user partition.

Correct. Question: if one installs another distro to the SSD and
whacks the 2-partition-unionfs setup, will the restore CD still work?
or does it depend on the factory partition?

 > (2) Their kernel is compiled with a memory limit of 1GB of RAM. I
 > installed 2GB of RAM

and you can't buy the damn things new with 2GB: ya hafta buy the box
with 512MB, buy a 2GB DIMM, and hang onto the 512MB in case you need
service (since Asus will only deal with the 512MB).

 > and I wanted to use it. Replacing the kernel is tricky, because if
 > you write it to /boot, it gets installed in the user partition, and
 > is never seen at boot time. You have to write it directly to the
 > factory partition, which is tricky.

 > (3) They also neglected to compile all of the modules that you might
 > want. For me, the stickler was dm-crypt. I have encrypted USB flash
 > drives and I need to read/write them. Without those modules, I am
 > stuck. The suggested solution was to download the kernel sources and
 > recompile the kernel. I am not sure whether I could have just built
 > the modules and then "insmod" them in their running kernel which was
 > built with those options as (N)o instead of (M)odule. <-- Question
 > for the LUG.

 > UBUNTU

 > So like you, I experimented with alternative distros. However, I
 > chose to try stock Ubuntu 7.10 instead of eeeXubuntu. It installed
 > smoothly. The only tricky part was the atheros wifi driver, and
 > there is source code with a patch that can easily solve that
 > problem. Download, make, make install, done. There were a handful of
 > other minor tweaks, and these were documented very well on the
 > Ubuntu wiki.

 > EEEXUBUNTU

 > This weekend, I looked closely at eeeXubuntu. I liked the idea that
 > all of their "tweaks" were packaged up into standard .deb files.
 > This is closer to The Debian Way, and it helps prevent some future
 > update from clobbering what I might have changed.

 > However, after looking over their web site, I quickly decided
 > against eeeXubuntu. Most of the things that were listed as "works in
 > progress" are working just fine for me under Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), so
 > why change?

Indeed, plus

* IIRC the eeeXubuntu crew seems to be dissolving

* there is a new community starting up @

http://ubuntu-eee.tuxfamily.org/index.php5?title=Main_Page

   and they already have an 8.04 downloadable, so I'll probably try
   that next.

 > I'm not knocking your choice to install eeeXubuntu.

I am :-) If I'd known the above when I was looking for an ubuntu, I
wouldn't have installed it. That being said, I've got eeeXubuntu on a
stick and it definitely works.

 > I did want to provide a clarification about the stock eee software,
 > and also another perspective on hacking the eee. It's a pretty sweet
 > box.

Yes, at least for portability, hardware robustness, and cost. The
main downsides for me are

* keys are too {small, closely packed} for my fingers. I still can't
   type worth a damn on it. I'm experimenting with USB keyboards;
   fortunately neither eee{Xandros, Xubuntu} has problems with so far.

* screen is too small for many apps. My vision (corrected) is pretty
   good and the small screen is pretty crisp. However one may spend a
   lot of time adjusting font sizes downward and scrolling dialogs
   about, noticing accessibility problems that would probably not be
   noticed on a "normal" screen.

FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>