Installing/running software on Asus eee PC

[elija]

The 701 doesn't have a SD card slot? I ran Fedora on 512 of RAM.

Yeah it does. And it ran the older Ubuntu releases just fine but given that Ubuntu has got a bit bigger and heavier over the past few releases, Xubuntu or Lubuntu may be a better fit from that family.

[waterhead]

Yeah it does. And it ran the older Ubuntu releases just fine but given that Ubuntu has got a bit bigger and heavier over the past few releases, Xubuntu or Lubuntu may be a better fit from that family.

I don't know about Ubuntu, but I had Fedora 16 installed on a 8GB SDHC card on my laptop.

The point is that the 4GB SSD is not a deterrent to installing a different Linux distro. It is only Windows that doesn't allow you to install to an external drive. You will need to enter the BIOS and make the SD card the first boot option.

[Moonlight_Fox]

Yeah, it does have an SD card slot, however the only card I currently have access to is 2GB!
If it can boot from USB, I could use my 8GB CF card.

I think actually it would be good if I could get it to run from the card.. that means if I screw something up, I can just boot from the internal SSD.

How easy or otherwise is it to do this?
I wish eeeuser would come back up, from what I saw, it had a lot of useful info and I noticed that most of the stuff I was searching for pointed to that site.

Anyway, thank you all for your comments and opinions thus far. If it were not for you lot, I'd probably still be trying to get blender and inkscape to run on Xandros. Knowing me, I'd probably have tried to drop the missing file into the directory and really screwed something up. lol

[waterhead]

Yeah, it does have an SD card slot, however the only card I currently have access to is 2GB!
If it can boot from USB, I could use my 8GB CF card.

I think actually it would be good if I could get it to run from the card.. that means if I screw something up, I can just boot from the internal SSD.

How easy or otherwise is it to do this?
I wish eeeuser would come back up, from what I saw, it had a lot of useful info and I noticed that most of the stuff I was searching for pointed to that site.

Anyway, thank you all for your comments and opinions thus far. If it were not for you lot, I'd probably still be trying to get blender and inkscape to run on Xandros. Knowing me, I'd probably have tried to drop the missing file into the directory and really screwed something up. lol

If the CF drive is hooked to a USB converter of some sort, then yes. On my 900 if I constantly keep pressing the Esc key during boot, a screen will pop up with the available boot disks.

To install Linux, you will need either a Live/installation CD (and a USB/CD drive) or make a bootable USB drive with the installation CD. Either way this will use one USB port. The CF/USB drive will take another USB port. So, you will need at least two available USB ports.

Once you have mastered making the bootable USB from the downloaded CD file (easy), you can try many different versions of Linux!

Edit: Running the Linux Live CD/USB on only 512MB RAM will not be a very pleasant experience. Since the Live CD runs entirely from the RAM. I would do it just to install Linux.

[Moonlight_Fox]

Live CD runs entirely from the RAM.

ahh..That would be a very good reason not to do it that way then!
Oh, well it was worth a thought!

[shellscriptcoder]

ahh..That would be a very good reason not to do it that way then!
Oh, well it was worth a thought!

Well, you could install it to the USB Drive! If you can find a light enough installer/Live USB image, you can put that on the 2GB SD Card and install it to the USB, from which it'll run happily.

If the CF drive is hooked to a USB converter of some sort, then yes. On my 900 if I constantly keep pressing the Esc key during boot, a screen will pop up with the available boot disks.

Just a time-saver - I think you only have to press it once.

[waterhead]

ahh..That would be a very good reason not to do it that way then!
Oh, well it was worth a thought!

You can to it, but it may be slow and laggy.

[waterhead]

Just a time-saver - I think you only have to press it once.

It's not a time saver if the one time you press it isn't at the right time. You then have to reboot.

[waterhead]

Well, you could install it to the USB Drive! If you can find a light enough installer/Live USB image, you can put that on the 2GB SD Card and install it to the USB, from which it'll run happily.

That would be somewhat backwards. If you install the OS to a USB drive, then you always have to have it plugged in, sticking out and easily bumped into.

It is better to use the USB drive as the install media, and install it to the SD cards. SD cards are not very expensive, and a class 2 will work just fine.

[shellscriptcoder]

That would be somewhat backwards. If you install the OS to a USB drive, then you always have to have it plugged in, sticking out and easily bumped into.

It is better to use the USB drive as the install media, and install it to the SD cards. SD cards are not very expensive, and a class 2 will work just fine.

I would usually agree with you, but in this case the OP stated that he only has access to a 2GB SD Card. Ergo, most modern Linux distros (such as Ubuntu and Fedora) would be more suited to having their Live USB images/installers on the smaller media. Plus, you'd have the risk of accidentally knocking out the installation media whether you use an SD Card or a USB Drive. It would be better to use the one with more space, in my opinion.

It's not a time saver if the one time you press it isn't at the right time. You then have to reboot.

I don't think you'll have to worry about that. On my eee 1001, it doesn't matter at which time you press it. At any rate, I've been on computers where you've got to time your keypress, and it's not that hard. If you keep the splash screen off (you can turn it off in the BIOS), you can see when the computer finishes initializing the hardware and at which time it begins allowing you to press the key.