have a Netbook?… want solid Linux support?

I currently have an Asus Eee PC (1002ha) and to say the least am not an avid Windows fan.  Since the day I unpackaged this puppy I have been on a quest to find the best OS I could for the lil guy.  So far I’ve ran EasyPeasy and OS X (needs drivers sadly otherwise this would have never been written) and looked into running Moblin (although I must admit I never installed it).  Long story short EasyPeasy was my distro of choice.

Recently 9.04 went stable and I had heard good things but after looking over the EasyPeasy forums decided not to upgrade.  Apparently it was breaking a lot of stuff and 8.10 was running solid enough to keep me content.

Over memorial day weekend I upgraded my desktop (8.10) to 9.04 and bricked the box so I ventured over the Ubuntu.com to get a fresh 9.04 install disk.  After doing a clean install the system was unstable and Firefox was a mess.  So I decided to check out Ubuntu.com again to see if any others were reporting issues or if I just had a botched install.  That’s when I noticed it… 9.04 Netbook Remix Edition!  I’m not sure how I missed this memo but seriously wtf!?  After looking over the wiki and confirming that the 1000h models were running fairly solid I was sold.

I downloaded their .img file threw it on my thumb drive using my Windows machine (9.04 wasn’t working yet) and plugged that puppy in.  The install was painless and fast and I was up and running in no time.  On the Ubuntu forums I had seen some issues of people reporting failures coming out of “sleep mode/stand by” and another user mentioned on their non-netbook that enabling “Effects” (and inturn upping the vid drivers) fixed the problem.  Now this is what shocked me… even on my 1002ha I was able to enable “Extra” (wobbly windowns, drop shadows, fading menus… the whole 9 baby!) under the effects panel (System->Preferences->Appearance->Visual Effects) and not only did it work… it worked well… damn well.

I had never expected the Compiz stuff to be so snappy on such low end video hardware (Intel Integrated 1.6Ghz Atom & 2 gigs of RAM) but it is!  One of my biggest pet peeves with my old EasyPeasy install were the hoops you’d have to jump through to disable “Tap to Click”.  I’d read over tutorials… borked some xorg configs and still because of the “special” touchpad they used on the 1002ha (multitouch … some random vendor) I wasn’t able to get it to work properly.  With 9.04 Netbook Edition it was as simple as unchecking a box in mouse preferences!

If you’re running EasyPeasy (love you guys, but sorry) I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go ahead and grab the new official Ubuntu netbook build (link at the end of the article) and get it on your Eee PC A.S.A.P.  I’m one very happy camper now that my lil guy has all the bells and whistles.  From my testing so far multitouch works, web cam works, sound works, function keys (brighness, volume, etc) all work (the mute button didn’t work under EasyPeasy)!

Now these next parts are mere speculation (as when you’re happy with a piece of software you tend to be a touch biased) and I haven’t tested these claims thoroughly but the machine feels faster, battery life seems to have improved, Flash (a known resource hog on all Linux boxes) seems to even perform better (sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree).

Hope this helps push a couple of other curious netbook owners over the edge and helps them take the plunge!

Ubuntu Netbook Edition : http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook