distro advice for Asus eee PC 1015B

[kai12]

Dear all,
I'm running easypeasy on an ASUS eee PC 1015B. Unfortunately, it's not running smoothly, and I'm thinking easypeasy 1.6, based on ubuntu 10 (10.04 if I recall correctly) may be too old. Also, this eee is powered by the AMD Fusion APU C50, and most eee support focuses on Intel chips.

The quirks that my eee has are sound/mic issues, problems with suspend/hibernating, short battery life, and general stability issues (system freezes under load for no apparent reason).

So here's where I'm asking your advise:
Which distro would you recommend?

I generally feel most at home on Debian-like systems, and I liked the easypeasy Desktop, but I'm not bound to either.


Right now I'm thinking: Mint 12 LXDE, but I'd have to wait until that is released.

kai

[sgosnell]

It's really a matter of what you like. That eee should run any modern distro fine, especially if you get one with a newer kernel. With 2.6.39 or later, especially 3.0 or 3.1, you don't really need any special tweaks for it. My 900 just works.

[CellarDweller]

I have the same netbook (only with a C60 cpu) and have the following issues:

# no sound in Debian, SuSe, Fedora in 64bit (same goes for 32bit)
# SuSe loosing contact to the internet sometimes (card is 'there', driver is 'on' but no connection to the modem at least...). Which occures just sometimes for some reason.

I think we're quite in the same boat.

LXDE is a really nice window manager - which froze just before when coming back from a non-graphical shell. I was still able to re-boot from the non-gui shell... yes, I'm a noob.

XFCE is also a very nice, low-resource Window manager. But one might enter the "hm: pizza or pasta?!" field here.

Today I found vectorlinux which boast to have to be up-to-date with drivers and hardware as good as possible. But changing the whole Linux-Distro until everything works can't be a solution.

I write this because we seem to be in the same boat with this really nicely built netbooks. Sound was always an issue with Linux - at least concerning me. I'll write you as soon I got to a solution.

[kai12]

@sgosnell: the eee 900 seems to run on an Intel CPU -- it seems to me this could make a large difference in compatibility; would you agree?

@CellarDweller: thanks for the reply! and I'll keep you posted on any success on my part as well...

[sgosnell]

Perhaps, but I think it probably has more to do with the motherboard than the CPU. You might try installing Jupiter and see if that helps.

[kai12]

I did try Jupiter. It didn't help with the issues I described initially, although it did solve one issue, I forget what that was. Thanks for the hint anyway.

[rokytnji]

Just some remastered Live Cds you may not know about. I don't know which may be best for your needs as my EEEPCs (701SD and 900) both run AntiX real well but I have tweaked them a lot over time with newer Kernels and Debian Testing repos.

Exton's International Blog | Announcements re. my International Linux remasters

[zrdc28]

I'm running slackware on my asus eeepc without a problem whatsoever, slackware has 8 or 9 different window managers with the full install. I use kde and xfce and they both work well.

[sensovision]

I'm running Debian Testing on 1015b-c50 sound output is working but not built-in microphone, external works without issues.

Also experienced issues with strange freezes during my last trip but I believe problems may be not because of high load as I provided much higher load in other times and nothing happened, but either bluetooth or overheating are to blame.

In other aspects it seems to perform just fine, and I got about 7 hours on battery which is more than sufficient to me.

[rokytnji]

I'm running Debian Testing on 1015b-c50 sound output is working but not built-in microphone

I don't know if my internal mic fix will work for you but here it is.

antiX-forum - View topic - eeepc 900 Microphone debian wheezy fix AntiX 11