I’ve been on the lookout for a small, portable machine with enough power to read PDF files, make notes, write text, do some coding perhaps and surf the net - preferably achieving all this without the feeling as if I were slowly torturing myself to death with some medieval high-tech device.

Mobile phones just don’t cut it - try reading PDF files with an M600i, for example. It’s very painful. Changing pages takes forever and the fonts are messed enough to trigger any migraine tendencies you might or might not have.

Then one beautiful day, through a stroke of luck, I got my hands on a nice, black Asus Eee 4G. Overall impression was: wow, that a tiny computer. Check the picture below, a can of Red Bull used for a size measure.

The Xandros OS which came with it was nice and “just worked out of the box” indeed, but I needed and wanted something more. If you’re new to Linux or don’t want to configure your computers, then you need not do anything - just use it! However, I’m not a Linux newbie and I can spend the occasional hour for tinkering, so I figured why not just roll my own installation to make the device behave and appear exactly the way I wanted. Of course, I could’ve just modified the Xandros by apt-getting packages and so on (since it’s Debian-based), but somehow I wanted to be a bit more adventurous.

Enter Ubuntu. I’ve never used that before but decided to give it a shot, especially since some people have already made a base image which includes for example Madwifi patches for the wireless network and so on. In other words, the basic functionality should be working properly from the start. You get fully configured X and everything else too, the function keys work out of the box and so on.

I went to a shop and bought a 2 Gb SD, then downloaded the eeeXubuntu image to my laptop. Setting up for installation was easy enough: format the SD card with ext2, loopback mount the eeeXubuntu .iso to /cdrom (no need to burn it), run the mkusbinstall.sh script and give it the device of the mounted SD card, and have a beer and wait for the script to finish, that’s it - now the SD card is prepared.

Unmount the card, put it into the Eee, power up and hold the ESC key. If you remember the famous “patiencechild” video, you will also be asking “Der Escape Knopf! Wo ist er!” since the key is reeeaaallly tiny like the Eee keyboard in general… A window pops up and asks you the boot drive. Choose to boot from the USB drive. Then the installer starts. It’s not scaling to the tiny screen quite properly, but you can move the window around by holding down Alt and clicking somewhere in the window with the left mouse, then moving the pointer.

I chose manual setup instead of automatic. The installer asked to make the partitions. I chose to wipe out the existing SSD setup, being fully aware that after this factory reset will be impossible since there will be nothing to restore. For the partitions, I made a 3.5 Gb ext3 partition to /, and added a 512 Mb swap. That’s it, really. The installer also asks to create the users, asks for the time zone and so on.

After the installer was finished working, it booted up Xubuntu. I opened the “manual network configuration” from the toolbar, told it my WLAN access point SSID, and wrote the key (WPA2 is supported nicely). Network was up, wirelessly. Then the updater said there’s a bunch of upgradeable packages so I let it upgrade those.

If someone still says that installing Linux is somehow hard, they likely a) have not tried, b) have some obscure medical condition which prevents higher brain functions… I don’t know. Even Debian installation some years back was very easy.

Anyway, now I had an up-to-date with the eeeXubuntu, and there was a little bit over 1.5 Gb of free space left. The next problem was, I wanted KDE but I got xcfe and Gnome. I installed the kubuntu-desktop metapackage which brought me KDE stuff, then chose KDM as the window manager. Next I rebooted the machine (a path of least resistance at this point although technically unnecessary), changed the login session to KDE and logged myself in again.

For some reason I had to manually set up the WLAN again by typing the password. But after this the wireless network worked again. Now space was becoming a bit tight, only around 300 Mb free, so I decided to take out all OpenOffice packages (as I don’t need them myself) and Gnome games etc., and finally the things related to Xcfe-desktop too. Now df -h showed 2.4 Gb used, 761 M free. I figured that’s good enough, since at least for the start I do expect to run some Gnome applications but mostly work with KDE things.

So, now I have a base system which can run Gnome and KDE things, has 750+ Mb free for new apps, plus an empty 2 Gb SD card for my own stuff. I intend to switch that to a 16 Gb SDHC card soon. When I was in the shop buying the card, I got a brainfart and became unsure if Eee supports SDHC (it does).

Why did I go with KDE? Well, I’m just used to that and find it’s efficient for me. Plus, I like the easy configureability of KDE. If it doesn’t cut it, or I need more space, I’ll just switch back to Gnome or something.

There were some problems and minor issues, of course.

One problem with KDE is that it doesn’t properly scale the windows to the small screen - the taskbar being on the bottom works a bit funnily, for example the “Configure KDE Panel” window does not understand to scale itself appropriately, and parts of the configuration window will go under the taskbar. KDE 3.5 is not 100% optimal for a 800×480 screen of the Eee, but I’m hoping to switch to KDE4 soon anyway.

Other issue is KDE’s network configuration toolbar applet which came with Kubuntu - it seems to only allow WEP encryption, not WPA2. But I used the Gnome tool and no problems there. I could of course set the wpa-supplicant up properly but I felt a bit lazy. I wanted a system up and running quick. The settings can be altered later once the basic system is running smoothly.

There are many distributions starting to be tailored for the Eee: based on basic Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc., just take your pick. I’m convinced that when Eee finally properly launches in Scandinavia there will be a huge boost in the capabilities of the distributions. Perhaps even some customized setup for small form factor screens (the screen should first of all be prominently black on white, i.e. dark text on a very light background, otherwise reading a tiny screen with small fonts just gives you a headache and fatigues your eyes).

All in all, the Eee is a huge step in the right direction. It’s a truly portable computer with enough power to do the normal things you really might want to do. It’s modifiable, it’s lightweight, it’s cheap and the battery life is OK. Maybe you can’t play the latest 3D games with it and maybe it lacks some features which bigger laptops have, but it just works well enough and does everything you really need to do (I can’t stress this point enough). Personally, I’ll be using it when commuting. It’s a good second laptop for those situations when you don’t want to haul that big laptop of yours with you - Eee just fits in your backback with no problems.