[clug] ASUS Eee PC 1000 solid state with LINUX

[Nathan Rickerby]

> 2008/9/8 jhock <jhock at iinet.net.au>:
> >
> > Does anyone see anything with these solid state PCs preventing me from
> > doing this?  Can I boot from an external DVD/CD player with UBUNTU and
> > then overwrite the M$ XP with UBUNTU operating system?

I bought an Acer Aspire One about a month ago, it came loaded with a Linux
(Linpus) but I installed ubuntu on it.  I'm sure you could do the same
with any of those machines.  If it comes with Windows, installing
something else may even be a bit more satisfying.

I found the easiest way to do the install was by booting from a usb
flash drive.

On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 03:27:50PM +1000, Chris Smart wrote:
> I also recently discovered that the EeePC 1000 model and it's
> so-called 40GB SDD is not a 40GB SDD at all - it's an 8GB SDD with a
> 32GB SD card stick in the slot.. misleading in my opinion and rather
> disheartening.

That's surprising.  When I bought the One I thought I was missing out on
a whole lot of SSD space but I guess not.

I've been really pleased with the Aspire One and recommend that anyone
considering a computer like this looks into them.  I was determined to get
a Linux 901 as soon as they became available here then I got all bitter
and twisted when the Linux ones didn't turn up so I started looking at
what else was around.

Sure, I could have waited until the multitudes of small computers became
available from other manufacturers but I needed it quickly to replace a
broken laptop.

I liked this one because the keyboard was big enough to be usable
for every day things.  There's no 'Designed for XP' sticker on it,
no unneeded Windows license stuck to the bottom.  It has a second SDHC
slot so I can add more 'permanent' storage later if I need it.  And it was
really cheap, particularly after the $100 cashback from Acer (which I'm
yet to see).  Cheap enough that I don't have to be paranoid about losing
or breaking it.

Unfortunately it doesn't have nearly as much battery life as some of the
others, but it is lighter and it still gets 2.5 hours (xubuntu) which is
enough for me.  Apparently there's a 6 cell battery coming out for it
later which would double that time.

The SSD is a bit slow, but that may be the same on all these machines.
hdparm says 25MB/sec.  I've avoided the slowness in some cases by setting
/tmp as a tmpfs, keeping the working directories for things like liferea
in /tmp and rsyncing to my home dir before and after running them.

Nathan