I’ve been looking for a while now for a small, light, cheap laptop that i could convert into a solid state machine by way of a compactflash - IDE adapter. After wading through countless ebay auctions of 300mhz machines for £200, I had basically given up… Until Sunday.

You see, on Sunday, someone mentioned the Asus eee pc to me in a conversation, saying how it was thin, light, and cheap… And it sounded perfect. So, come Monday i hit Google and found some reviews, saw a takeapart guide, found out it was completely solid state, and ran a customized version of Xandros Linux.

It sounded perfect, if only i could find somewhere that sold it! I quickly hit up RM, the official UK distributor, to find that their price was £240 including vat and delivery. One problem though, they’re not selling them until the 16th! So, i head back to Google, and find that eBuyer have them for £220 including VAT. Out of stock again… but they have a black version in stock! I hit buy quickly, before that little bit of sanity I have left comes back to tell me not to, and tack on next day delivery, because the insane part of my brain is also impatient.

It arrived Tuesday morning, and I immediately set about getting rid of Xandros, and replacing it with the glory that is Ubuntu Gutsy. Easy enough, the basic install worked from a USB DVD drive as it would on any other PC.

Once i had the OS installed, it was time for customization and optimization. Step 1 was to get the wireless working. Easy as hell with ndiswrapper from the Gutsy install DVD, and the windows driver from the eee driver disk.  Once that was set up, i could connect easily to WPA networks through nm-applet, and run an update. After that i set /tmp and /var/log to run from tmpfs RAM drives, and

My eee has been running along nicely now for 3 days, Unknowing of the horror i am soon going to unleash on it with a soldering iron, and some USB devices…

Tune in soon to see what happens…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 9:45 am and is filed under Computing, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.