Evan Martin (evan) wrote in evan_tech,
Evan Martin
evan
evan_tech

netbook linux

I borrowed a Eee PC 1008HA to try out Linux Chrome on it.

Jolicloud: thought I'd check it out but it's invite-only.

Moblin: hardware ran perfectly out of the box, but the UI is really weird. It's not clear to me who their target audience is; for example, the "social networking" pane only had last.fm and twitter login prompts. Maybe it's too early for actual users? Maybe I'm too weird. It eerily reminds me of OLPC (and Matt observed the same thing unprompted), in not a good way.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix: neither ethernet nor wifi worked out of the box; installing the linux-backports-modules-jaunty deb that matched my kernel and rebooting made wifi work, but during the middle of the apt-get dist-upgrade it hard locked (even the mouse stopped), and after rebooting the file system was so corrupt the fsck mentioned many important files hosed and it wouldn't even shut down from single user mode. (Especially weird since it's ext3 and it was just downloading debs at the time... ?)

Debian: it turns out they've got a special Eee project! And I was even wearing my Debian tshirt today! But I fought for more time that I'd like to admit with their instructions and couldn't figure out how to get it going. (Their standard installer doesn't yet support this hardware, which means you need some combination of a newer installer and a standard CD onto the install media. And I did stupid stuff like forget to mark my USB drive partition as FAT16 when fdisking it.)

Any other suggestions? I don't much care about fancy UI stuff, just want the hardware to work.
Tags: linux
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