Tweaking the eee

[Freston]

I see more an more people here confessing they own an eee. I'd like to know what your experiences are. Did you keep the OS it came with? Do you like the OS it came with?

And of course, what are your experiences with tweaking the machine? Did you install a new OS, and how does the machine behave under that load?

[elija]

Well, mine runs Debian Lenny. I have apache, PHP and Mysql on there so I can develop in PHP on the train. I also have vim full and gcc on there so I can continue learning c on the train too.

It runs fine.

[Dapper Dan]

We're on vacation so I'm coming to you from my EEE PC right now!

After seeing all the various threads and posts about how to get this and that distro installed on the EEE PC, I'm starting to believe I'm the only soul who finds the stock distro and interface adequate! lol...

The only app I installed that I felt was necessary (for me) is Digikam. It seems logical this type of machine should have a good digital camera downloading utility. I have also installed Nvu and Gnucash (just yesterday) to help new members who want those apps, but I don't use them and will eventually remove them.

I frankly believe there are many buyers of the EEE PC who place unreasonable demands on this machine. Digikam, Gnucash and even Nvu seem reasonable, but I just go crazy when I see posts like, "Help getting EEE PC run as Counter Strike server!" and then see virulent complaints that the machine is "rubbish" and "worthless" because it won't do what they demand. That's like buying a golf cart and them complaining because it doesn't have four wheel drive! I am of course, using extreme examples to make a point here.

I think you can be happiest with an EEE PC when you don't make unreasonable demands of it. If I can get a wireless connection, surf the Internet, go to Linuxforums, check Email, download pictures and see an occasional YouTube video or a movie, and do all the above in places where it is impractical to have a larger machine, it's doing more than enough to make me happy.

Just my opinion for what it's worth.

[elija]

I agree. It can do a lot for such a small machine but obviously it has its limits! At one point I had mine running compiz, with wobbly windows desktop cubes, the works. It drove the fan mad and drained the battery so fast you could see it counting down.

An intersting experiment, but I wasn't too disappointed that it wasn't practical. In fact I was impressed that it worked at all!

I wonder if I could get it to render a 1,000,000 polygon scene in blender

[geniuz]

Hrm, I somehow find it looking a LOT like an ordinary Macbook from Apple (I will own one very soon), just smaller and slower and less battery time, but hell a Macbook costs 6 times the amount of that.

[Freston]

Hmmmm


So you're saying I can't use the eee for hosting my GTA4 lan party?? Grmbl

No, kidding aside, I think the eee might be a good addition to my arsenal of machines because it's light and easy to carry around. Also, I don't like carrying around my main laptop to much.

But it leaves me wondering, how much performance can you get out of the eee when you install a fully featured distro on it? Like the Lenny that elija put on his machine, well does that give it a 3 minute boot time or something?? I'd think you'd sooner install DSL on it or something, but then DSL seems sub-optimal as it has the 2.4 kernel (which I fear might lead to hardware incompatibility problems... although I might be wrong).

Did you need to make a lot of adjustments to get some performance out of it?

An intersting experiment, but I wasn't too disappointed that it wasn't practical. In fact I was impressed that it worked at all!

Now that /is/ impressive

[Dapper Dan]

Did you need to make a lot of adjustments to get some performance out of it?

My EEE boots in seconds. Apps come up in a reasonable period of time. Not anything like feeling like you're having to wait too long. To me, the stock interface runs just fine and does what I want. I've not changed it in the least.

My advice: If you purchase one, don't rush to put anything else on it. Play with it a while, get familiar with it and see if it suits your needs. If not, then change it. I wouldn't want to find myself in a position of having installed something else on it immediately, only to wish I'd left it the way it was.

[elija]

It takes a minute or two to boot Debian Lenny. After that it runs just fine. I haven't done anything to ee(e)k out a bit more performance. It's doing what I want it to quickly enough.

I didn't really like the default install of the Xandros thing, the repos had nothing I wanted and adding the Debian repos can break updates.

Distro ***** that I am I have had the following installed and running fine on my eee pc

Zenwalk
XUbuntu (with Compiz)
Debian Lenny. Seem to have settled with this one for now

[Freston]

The main thing for me is that I'd need ssh to be able to run, and preferably sshfs. But I take it that wont be a problem, no matter which OS finds it's way to the HD.

Also (see sig ) I don't care to much about which GUI will run. I just had a thought. I'll download the eee OS from somewhere and run it in virtualbox. See what happens. That would be interesting

Thanks for your input guys!