RE: [BLUG] What have you done with Linux lately?

I have an ASUS EEEPC 1000. As a Linux newcomer, I opted to replace the Xandros desktop with EasyPeasy (after a period of experimentation with standard Ubuntu). Everything worked "out of the box" with EasyPeasy and was comparatively user friendly for someone new to Linux. In a few months, however, I grew tired of the EasyPeasy screen which can't easily be tweaked with backgrounds and etc. and installed "desktop-switcher" so that I could switch back and forth between EasyPeasy and Ubuntu eee. With Compiz effects on the latter, however, switching back and forth between them never really worked satisfactorily. There always seemed to be artifacts from the Ubuntu eee desktop that carried over and interfered with the EasyPeasy desktop. After a while, I switched to EeeBuntu which I've been using every since. EeeBuntu takes a little more work (than the alternatives) to get the function keys and sound to work they way they are supposed to but seems very stable.

One issue with any of the EEEPC desktops described above is finding a way to disable the touchpad when typing. It is very annoying to have one's cursor jump around when typing because of accidentally brushing the touchpad. There are several fixes described in the online various forums, but so far, I haven't found the one that works. Apart from this, I've been pretty happy with my EeeBuntu netbook.

Charles Reafsnyder

-----Original Message-----
From: blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu [mailto:blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu] On Behalf Of Simón Ruiz
Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 8:01 AM
To: Bloomington LINUX Users Group
Subject: Re: [BLUG] What have you done with Linux lately?

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Kirk Gleason <kgleason@gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you installed Linux on the Asus Eee PC? I just bought one for yet
> another project at work, and I was wondering if the thing would run Linux.

Yeah, that's why it had such a big buzz in the Linux community when it
came out. It comes pre-installed with some version of Linux, and I
think the Ubuntu Netbook Remix is designed to work flawlessly on it.

I've also been testing out a bunch of different netbooks at work. The
EeePC is one I haven't gotten my hands on, yet, actually.

I've played with an Asus Aspire One, a Dell Mini 9, and an HP Mini
1000; the Mini 1000 hardware is the worst supported in UNR, but as a
widescreen netbook, the keyboard is almost human sized.

When my 70-year-old mother-in-law was asking about getting a tiny
laptop to take notes at meetings. She wanted it too soon for Dell Mini
10 to be a viable option, so I recommended getting the HP Mini 1000 Mi
edition and leaving the HP flavor of Ubuntu it comes with, at least
until Karmic(here's hoping...) gets the audio hardware figured out
upstream.

At that point, I can make her netbook's desktop look just like her
desktop's desktop by installing stock Ubuntu on it if she likes.

Simón

P.S. I also played a bit with a Kindle 2. I gotta say I was pretty
impressed with it for reading. As a hardware device it's totally O.S.
agnostic; I only interacted with it from Linux and I didn't feel like
a second-class citizen.

It's only *amazingly* easy if you get everything from Amazon, though
it's still pretty easy to put "foreign" content on their.

You can load content onto it as if it were any old USB flash drive,
though it *is* picky about what *kind* of files it reads. (Kindle
format, Mobi format, plain text (though it will recognize and honor
some basic html tags inside plain text files, which made it really
great for reading some of Cory Doctorow's CC-licensed books which come
in HTML)).

And you have to put them in the right directories, if you put an mp3
file in the "secret" "music" folder, you can play it through the
Kindle speakers while you're reading other things. If you put the same
file into the "Audible" directory, it'll treat them like an audiobook
to be listened to all by itself.

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