ASUS eee PC + Ubuntu eee = WowEEE!

I picked up an ASUS eee PC just under a year ago, and after running the Xandros distribution (albeit with hacks) for most of that time, I decided to explore other options. It took longer than anticipated to accomplish (my eee PC kept seeing my pendrive as a hard drive, so I couldn't pick it from the boot menu as I was expecting), but I finally managed to run/install the Ubuntu eee distro.

I wanted to set down my initial impressions while they were still fresh in my mind.

I was able to make a bootable Live USB key easily. There's a GUI tool that makes it a simple process-- no command line kung-fu required. The desktop interface is an elegant, highly functional compromise between a full desktop and a novice switchboard. The performance of the Live USB key was slow/disconcerting, but don't let that discourage you-- it runs faster after you install it on the internal SSD.

A word to the wise about the actual installation process: when I tried to install Ubuntu eee from within the session of Ubuntu, I got to step 5 and found the keyboard was unresponsive. This was a problem since step 5 required entering account information, like name, user id and password. I had to reboot from the USB key and pick the Install Ubuntu option from the default boot menu. Your mileage may vary.

Almost everything worked "out of the box" with the installation. It picked up the WiFi (Atheros adaptor) and easily handled my home wireless WPA2 encryption. After wrestling with Ubuntu on a G4 PowerPC iBook (with a Broadcom adapter), I was expecting trouble. The only obvious hardware-specific snafu was the webcamera (which had been DISABLED in the BIOS).

As far as software goes, I wound up receiving somewhere in the ballpark of 250 MB of updates. No glitches per se, but it had to do the updates in two stages/reboots in order to resolve some dependencies. The synaptic manager is more flexible and versatile than the software update interface found in the Xandros/eee PC distro.

It was a little bit of a rocky start, but the overall experience has been positive and continues to impress me.