securitybreach Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 (edited) I received my EEEpc 4G yesterday evening so I thought I would add my thoughts of it. To begin with, I was amazed at the size. I knew it was small since I probably looked at about 50 pictures and videos of the EEEpc online but it was still a visual surprise. Once you get used to the keyboard and screen, they both seem adequate for this type of machine. I am typing this on my EEEpc with minimal errors. I did notice that even though the processor is underclocked (after bios update the processor was running at the full 900mhz) and only 512mb ram, this machine runs blazing fast. I thought the easy mode was kinda lame so first I enabled the KDE full desktop. Of course I am a Geek so I knew I would not be satisfied by the Easy Mode. After enabling Advanced mode, I noticed there were a few tweaks that needed to be done visually. First off the mouse pointer is too big compared to the gui. I guess this is because of the Easy Mode interface but it is not suited for regular KDE. Next the KDE start button took about a third of the taskbar which was easily fixed using the EEEpc user wiki http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ . Another problem was the fonts were too big. I dont know why they chose the font size 10, it should have been more like 8 point size. Another thing the KDE version is only 3.4.2 which is kinda of old. I guess I could update the version later. Another issue is the whole add/remove thing. The partitions are set up as follows: The harddive is divided into four partitions, the first two of which are combined via UnionFS: / (root) partition (2.7GB, ext2), /home partition (1.3GB, ext2), a FAT32 partition (8MB) for the bios, and an EFI partition (8MB) which I do not know what this does. There is no swap partition. The root partition is not writable because of the UnionFS which means you can not really remove anything. For one I do not need the games, education stuff, openoffice, along with some other program that are just taking up space. So I tried removing the UnionFS using this guide: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=2650 . I get through to about the middle of the guide and when trying to do this: 1. Reboot your eeePC2. During the boot press F9: the grub console should show3. On the first item of the grub console press 'e'4. On the third line of the window that pops up, press 'e' ( the line starts with initrd )5. replace in the third line the initramfs-eeepc.img name with kibobo.img6. press enter7. press bThen I get Error 15 File not found I fails after changing initramfs-eeepc.img to kibobo even kibobo is in the boot directory. I tried doing all the steps over thinking I missed something but still get the error. So I then installed eeeXubuntu. The installation went fine but eeeXubuntu did not run as well as the default Xandros does. Some of the problems was no way to control the sound, battery monitor did not work, could not get it to read usb drives out the box, flash not working right even using Flash and gnash, etc. Until a completely supported Linux distro comes along I guess its Xandros. On a side note there are many guides to setting up other distros or variants but none are all 100% yet. These include eeeXubuntu, EEEDora, Ubuntu, dreaded XP, DSL Linux, Puppy Linux, and gentoo. So I ended up reinstalling Xandros and recustomized KDE and so forth. I guess I will continue to try to find out how to remove the UnionFS. Let me know if anyone finds anything. Thanks Edited December 21, 2007 by securitybreach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crp Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 Hi,How did you reinstall the Xandros ?I'm a bit confused about the whole OS thing. The OS is on a SD card? So can't one just buy another SD card , clone the Xandros to it and then just pop that in to restart with Xandros if the other OS is not up to running the EEE ?From what I have read on this forum, it seems that this would be a good buy for me as what I am looking for is a way to run ssh for terminal access , do some web surfing, a little bit of photography and maybe an occassional phone call. Really wondering about paying the extra $100 for the additional 4Gig of space and 512M of RAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 21, 2007 Author Share Posted December 21, 2007 Hi,How did you reinstall the Xandros ?I'm a bit confused about the whole OS thing. The OS is on a SD card? So can't one just buy another SD card , clone the Xandros to it and then just pop that in to restart with Xandros if the other OS is not up to running the EEE ?From what I have read on this forum, it seems that this would be a good buy for me as what I am looking for is a way to run ssh for terminal access , do some web surfing, a little bit of photography and maybe an occassional phone call. Really wondering about paying the extra $100 for the additional 4Gig of space and 512M of RAM.The enclosed dvd has a rescue install to usb drive option. Then just hit esc at boot and choose what to boot from. Even if you get the 8g model you still cannot remove programs without removing the Unionfs.Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 21, 2007 Author Share Posted December 21, 2007 Well through trial and error I finally removed the UnionFS. Now I have 2gb free instead of 1.3gb. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 21, 2007 Author Share Posted December 21, 2007 (edited) OK I think I have it the way I want now. My install is down to about 1.5gb with all my programs, so I still have 2.5gb free. Good thing I have a 16gb usb stick and a 500gb external hdd. This laptop is truly amazing Best $400 I have ever spent.Thanks Edited December 21, 2007 by securitybreach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted December 21, 2007 Share Posted December 21, 2007 Very kewl! :thumbsup:I would not do anything with the EFI partition (8MB):EFI System Partition Subdirectory Registryhttp://www.dig64.org/specifications/OnLine...s/ESP_Registry/ This is an industry registry of vendor-specific subdirectories in the EFI system partition. The registry aims to ensure orderly, consistent, and conflict-free naming of files that reside in the EFI system partition, as well as help facilitate industry-wide conformance to the Directory Structure guidelines for the EFI system partition described in the EFI Specification. All entries in the registry have been approved by, requested by, or included with due notice to their corresponding vendors. Subscription to and use of this registry is covered by the Legal Disclaimer of this website.Then there is a table for various hardware vendors and where their stuff is located in the EFI. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 21, 2007 Author Share Posted December 21, 2007 Very kewl! :thumbsup:I would not do anything with the EFI partition (8MB):EFI System Partition Subdirectory Registryhttp://www.dig64.org/specifications/OnLine...s/ESP_Registry/Then there is a table for various hardware vendors and where their stuff is located in the EFI.Yeah I read that the 3rd and 4th partitiona must be kept for bios upgrades, etc. Thanks for the iinfo on EFI. Its funny I have been using this machine for about 8 hours and now I cannot seem to type on my regular laptop without making errors. :'( Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tommyj12 Posted December 22, 2007 Share Posted December 22, 2007 I saw a couple of guys that have pclos running and the hardware database wants to have this the first certified works with pclos! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cybrmat Posted December 23, 2007 Share Posted December 23, 2007 (edited) I've been looking at this thinking it would be fun to do the same. Still not sure which model to get. securitybreach, does your model have the PCIe expansion slot? I like the 8gb because it does have the PCIe slot but not fond of the color, it appears the 8G model only comes in white. But If I could be sure of getting a 4G unit with the PCIe slot, I probably would go that route. Edited December 23, 2007 by cybrmat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 I've been looking at this thinking it would be fun to do the same. Still not sure which model to get. securitybreach, does your model have the PCIe expansion slot? I like the 8gb because it does have the PCIe slot but not fond of the color, it appears the 8G model only comes in white. But If I could be sure of getting a 4G unit with the PCIe slot, I probably would go that route.Nope, next to the ram is an empty slot with no connectors. Of course a little soldering and you could put whatever you would like in it. There are many mods in the eeepc user forms.ThanksI saw a couple of guys that have pclos running and the hardware database wants to have this the first certified works with pclos!Wow I would love to have PcLinuxOS installed. If I can get it to install to usb I will try it.Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 It seems they have remaster for eeepc http://www.mypclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?board=86.0Downloading the remaaster now.Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cybrmat Posted December 23, 2007 Share Posted December 23, 2007 Thanks for your response securitybreach! I'm guessing you ordered your 4G unit in the US and since you just received it, it's probably safe to say no more 4G units with the PCIe slot? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 More than likely :(Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cybrmat Posted December 23, 2007 Share Posted December 23, 2007 Is your model the Surf or Non-Surf 4G Model? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 (edited) Not surf. Got the Webcam and all.Thanks Edited December 23, 2007 by securitybreach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zlim Posted December 23, 2007 Share Posted December 23, 2007 What does it mean surf or non-surf?I've been looking at these for awhile and still don't understand how you'd do a reinstall if the thing crashes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 (edited) The difference between the surf model and the regular one the camera and the batterylife. The surf model battery has a 4-cell, Li-Ion, 4400 mAh, 7.4 volts: 2 h 45 min battery life and the regular version has a 4-cell, Li-Ion, 5200 mAh, 7.4 volts: 3 h 30 min battery life. Also, the 2gb surf has the ram soldered on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PCIf you keep the default OS (xandros) you can restore through the bios by hitting F9. Otherwise you have to reinstall from a usb stick, SD card, or usb dvd drive if you have one. Otherwise you need either wine or Winblows on a machine with a dvd drive, This is because there is a restore option on the included dvd. I personally took a 1gb flash disk and installed the rescue on it. I think having a restore disk on a dvd is kinda stupid since this machine does not have a dvd drive. I think it would of made more since to include a usb thhumbdrive since they are extremely cheap nowadays. And why a windows program to reinstall with. This computer neither has a dvd drive or windows. Sorry for the rant. Hopefully this will explain the restore process.BTW these are amazing little machines for the price.I have been using it way more than my coreduo laptop. It has amazed me that I can do some much with only 4gb total considering I still have 1803mb free. This experience has made me realize, with everything online nowadays, I do not need much storage. By having usb drives a lot of the space on the harddrive has been freed up. Not just with this computer but in general. Now I have my 7gb mp3 collection on one usb stick, all my movies and full backups on my usb harddrive (500gb) at home, and a couple of 2gb SD cards for playing a movie on my eeepc or other media. Plus I set up my machine where I can ssh into from home. Thanks Edited December 23, 2007 by securitybreach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zlim Posted December 23, 2007 Share Posted December 23, 2007 (edited) I think having a restore disk on a dvd is kinda stupid since this machine does not have a dvd drive. That's what had me confused.Also the choice of the name "surf" confused me. I'm easily confused. I thought maybe the non-surf didn't include the wifi capability!I found the eeusers forum and I'm reading through that.I don't part with my money easily. It will either be an 8 gig version of this or a MacBook Pro. I know there is quite a price difference. But if I spend $500 for something less useful then it is money wasted and I would have done better spending the $2000. So I'm trying to decide which one will be the best buy for me and that's a tough decision.I finally found a chart comparing all the current modelshttp://wiki.eeeuser.com/eee_pc_701#modelsthat's exactly what I need to see.I've been reading about this for hours and I now have two other questions:1. Most people seem to think the 4GB is a better deal than the 8GB because you can "mod" it more. I've no idea what that means. I think I figured out that the 4GB can hold SDHC cards but the 8GB can only hold SD cards.2. If I purchase XP (I can't believe I'm saying that, LOL), can I run it from a flash drive?I have no desire to install it because truthfully, I'd do better learning the ins and outs of Xandros, aside from it being more secure surfing wifi - most people won't be able to figure out how to hack it. I'd just maybe want to run XP occasionally (and I've learned how to turn the wifi off) to use some windows apps but not surf with it.I found the answer to the second question...too much caffeine and hours of readinghttp://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176Now to see if I can figure this out. Edited December 23, 2007 by zlim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 Most of the people in the EEEpc forums have been using nlight http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html to remove unneeded components from windows xp. I personally would not run windows but nlight is the unofficial way of running windows on the EEEpc.Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 (edited) Well I finished downloading the PCLinuxOS eeepc remaster http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=4977I installed it to a usb drive following the instruction from pendrivelinux. Almost everything works perfectly. The only problems I could find were the webcam does not work by default and the fn sound buttons do not work although the brightness button and the hibernate buttons do work.The sound works perfectly using kmix. The resolution is perfect although some things have to be moved around using the ALT button which is the same as using the default Xandros. The wireless needs ndiswrapper and the drivers on the included restore dvd. I can even use compiz-fusion although it needs to be installed through the Control Center. Everything looks good so now I am installing it using only a / partition and no swap. One thing I noticed about the default Xandros was the repositories were pitiful and if you use the Xandros or Debian repos, you end up with a broken system. Also, synaptic is extremely buggy in Xandros. For instance, every other time I click apply button I get errors. I end up having to click it numerous times to work. Having PCLinuxOS will be excellent since they have huge repos and excellent hardware detection.Thanks Edited December 23, 2007 by securitybreach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 23, 2007 Author Share Posted December 23, 2007 (edited) PCLinuxOS is beautiful on this machine. I think the developers should of used this by default. This is my space after removing uneeded programs. [[comhack@Pluto ~]$ dfFilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on/dev/sda1 3.7G 1.6G 1.9G 46% [comhack@Pluto ~]$ uname -aLinux Pluto 2.6.22.10.tex1 #1 SMP Thu Oct 11 09:44:19 WST 2007 i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz GNU/Linux I even have the house key on the keyboard assigned to open home. I know you can do this easily in KDE but its better than having to assign konqueror to the windows key on most keyboards. It makes more sense.Thanks Edited December 23, 2007 by securitybreach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zlim Posted December 24, 2007 Share Posted December 24, 2007 Looks great. I think what you did is way beyond my abilities. Maybe if I drag my feet a little longer, they will offer a model with PCLinux on it. Here's hoping! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 24, 2007 Author Share Posted December 24, 2007 Looks great. I think what you did is way beyond my abilities. Maybe if I drag my feet a little longer, they will offer a model with PCLinux on it. Here's hoping!Its actually pretty easy and straightforward. BTW I just installed the Alpha 2 version and now the webcam works,WOOTThankd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cybrmat Posted December 25, 2007 Share Posted December 25, 2007 securitybreach, thanks for the update. Putting PCLinuxOS on the EEE PC is just what I wanted to do. Now that I see it on your's I'm really ready to get one. I like PCLinuxOS and use it as my main distro, so this looks real tempting. Now that you have PCLinuxOS installed, is it possible to revert back to Xandros; if you ever wanted to?I also thinking if anyone has tried Vector, I'll bet it would also run great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tommyj12 Posted December 25, 2007 Share Posted December 25, 2007 This is awesome that pclos worked so well, I was following this from the very first post. I hope I can save up enough after christmas to get one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 25, 2007 Author Share Posted December 25, 2007 (edited) securitybreach, thanks for the update. Putting PCLinuxOS on the EEE PC is just what I wanted to do. Now that I see it on your's I'm really ready to get one. I like PCLinuxOS and use it as my main distro, so this looks real tempting. Now that you have PCLinuxOS installed, is it possible to revert back to Xandros; if you ever wanted to?I also thinking if anyone has tried Vector, I'll bet it would also run great.The included DVD has options to reinstall using the dvd via an external dvd drive. The other option is to use the installer to install the recovery to either a usb drive or a SSD card but you will need windows or wine to run the DVD. An included pen-drive would of made more sense considering how cheap they are nowadays. Of course with the default Xandros,recovery is easy as holding down F9 during boot. I have reinstalled a few times while tinkering with different distros and the entire process was no more than 15 minutes. That includes the 5-7 minutes of running the install to pendrive in windows and about 5 minutes to restore the default Xandros when booting from pendrive. So yes restoring is very simple.Vector Linux could be installed but not without major modifications. Most all of the versions of linux for the EEEpc are remasters that have the drivers included and have an optimized kernel specifically for the EEEpc. . You could install a vanilla (unmodified) version of Linux but you may or may not have all of your hardware detected. The good thing about it is all the source code is available if anyone wants to make a remaster of any distro.Thanks Edited December 25, 2007 by securitybreach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zlim Posted January 11, 2008 Share Posted January 11, 2008 I'm dredging this old thread up securitybreach, just to find out how your eeepc is performing.I'm about 5% away from buying one. I actually wanted an 8gig model but NewEgg doesn't seem to have them. I actually went to the bank and upped the limit on my internet-only credit card from a permanent $500 limit just so I could buy one. I may settle for the 4gig model (no-surf) because I do want the longer battery life.I have an inverter with car adapter so I could keep it plugged in, when I travel by car then just use the battery at the hotspots.I'd probably stick with the default vanilla-Xandros until pclinux becomes stable. Is it doable to consider putting pclinux on a 4 gig hd? Of course, if I figured it out, I could put /home on an SD card and I now on a solid state hd, swap isn't needed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ross549 Posted January 12, 2008 Share Posted January 12, 2008 I got one. Very nice!Everything that comes preinstalled works very well. The media player played most of my files, but I did end up adding some repos to apt and installing VLC media player and xchat. I also did a bit of tweaking and added xchat to the easy menu.The only thing that took a while to figure out.... some of the windows are too big for the screen. to move the window, simply Alt-click on the window and drag to where you want.I love this thing a lot! It really works very well!Adam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cluttermagnet Posted January 12, 2008 Share Posted January 12, 2008 I love it that these are small, run a Linux OS, and selling like hotcakes! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ross549 Posted January 12, 2008 Share Posted January 12, 2008 Yep!I am amazed that while they are so small, they are very useful. You know, you really don't notice that they are only running a 900MHz processor. I was going to upgrade the RAM to 1GB, but that may not even be necessary. Adam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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