SBLinux.org

Whew! After a lot of experimentation, I've settled on Slax for running my Eee 4G (701). Basically, everything works now (with some ferreting of forums), it's up to date, it's very small, and it's relatively easy to update and maintain. (I ensured it was running well from a USB flash drive first before cloning the partition to the internal SSD. I've kept a copy of Xandros running from a USB flash drive too, "just in case".)

I got the original Xandros running okay in the 'Advanced Desktop' mode, but the software packages were hard to update and little space was left on the SSD for data. Other distros I looked at were: Arch (got lost in unresolved "issues"), Sidux (close), Debian (okay but some things not working), Mandriva (OTT - scared off by size and length of installation).

My backup distro for quick jobs has to be PupEee, a variant of Puppy 3.01.

Anyone else got an Eee story to tell?

PS: Forgot to say that Slax offers a simple firewall (same as Puppy one) which the original Xandros doesn't.

Slax is a great little Slackware-based distro from Czecho-slak-vakia.

I like it quite a bit, but currently am not running it on any of my machines.

I'd be interested to hear more about the Eee/Slax system you have going, and I think others would, too. If you're up to writing an article we could even think about offering it as an alternative guide to the Eee-PC on the main SBLinux.org website. But even if you aren't that ambitious, please give us more details. Battery life, any problems with the amount of RAM or file storage space, etc.

thanx,
SilverBear

@SilverBear,

Would certainly be happy to comment further, and I feel I have learned quite a bit from the exercise. Am currently transferring to an ext2 formatted drive rather than FAT32, to make it much easier to rsync preserving permissions etc, for backup purposes.

We've got a few family hassles at the moment to attend to, so it may take me a wee bit of time to put digit to keyboard to document things. But, as the Terminator said, "I'll be back!".

Farcry wrote:@SilverBear,

Would certainly be happy to comment further, and I feel I have learned quite a bit from the exercise. Am currently transferring to an ext2 formatted drive rather than FAT32, to make it much easier to rsync preserving permissions etc, for backup purposes.

We've got a few family hassles at the moment to attend to, so it may take me a wee bit of time to put digit to keyboard to document things. But, as the Terminator said, "I'll be back!".

Ah, but will you be on the side of the ones trying to SAVE the world or obliterate it? Terminator went from the "bad" side to the "good" side in the later episodes. I trust you will be on the "good side" when you apply your digits to the keyboard.

The PCLOS family has generally rated among the top in the RPM category. They inherit good hardware support from the Mandriva side of their heritage and good packaging as well from their PCLinuxOS heritage. Taking out the heavier desktop manager and applications and replacing them with Fluxbox as the window manager, and smaller application alternatives, then tying it together with a clean interface, several of the "Tiny*" projects under the PCLinuxOS Community umbrella have done well.