Geekout: different OSes on the Eee

The Eee is very happy to run OSes off flashdrive. And since much of the action on a netbook actually happens in the cloud you can play with LiveCD/LiveUSB OSes painlessly.

Here's what I've done so far:

* Windows XP (came installed on the Eee). 2700MB installed. XP will not run off flashdrive and has a heavy footprint, so it's gone. But it did work out of the box (OOB hereafter) at least as much as I tested. I understand one can use nLite against one's XP install disk to strip all the crap out and end up with a reasonable experience. 2.7GB. Holy crap.

WIN:
* Puppy Linux 4.2.1, 101MB installed. Everything other than wifi worked OOB. Installed madwifi-hal driver pet and all is well. This is my current OS. Understand that this fully functional OS is 1/27th the size of the XP installation. That's 3.7% of the size, people. WTH is going on at Micro$oft?

* TinyCore, 11MB installed (!). Holy crap, this booted in like 10 seconds. Ethernet worked fine. Fought with it for a couple of hours to get savefile persistence and the Wifi up. Did get it running, though. I felt like I won a fistfight. BTW, TCL boots so fast that some users have to artificially insert delays in order to let slower peripherals to initialize. Truly amazing, but a bit of a hairshirt. Not sure I'm man enough for it. Still, it's 1/10th the size of Puppy (and 1/270th the size of XP) . That's just crazy talk.

* pupeee-b4, 100MB installed. Based on Puppy Linux 3.x. Worked OOB.

* pupeee-4.2, 100MB installed. Based on Puppy Linux 4.2. Worked OOB.

LOSE:
* Easy Peasey: 900MB installed. would not finish loading kernel image.
* Damn Small Linux: 50MB installed. Would not finish live boot.
* slitaz-eeepc: 25MB installed. Would not finish live boot. Hung at "configuring ath0". Known issue.

Honorable Mention:
* Eeebuntu: 500MB installed. Completely gorgeous. Slow load. Too frakking big.

* Boxpup 4.1: 85MB installed. Based on the lightweight, fluxbox-like OpenBox window manager. Very nice, but seems to lag further behind Puppy than the Pupeee variant.


You have been geekified.

eee arrives

Ordered it Thursday from buy.com, got it Friday. I think they must have a DC somewhere in DFW because most of my free shipping stuff from Buy gets here the next day.

Unboxed the eee. Looks new, other than the box being opened.

Plugged it in, booted up to WinXP. Took about 15mins from boot to get connected to wireless surfing the net. Most of the delay was "found new hardware" and "what's your name, do you want to register" crapola. Worked fine fine to me.

Verified it worked fine, then rebooted with puppeee on a sdcard. Booted to linux and was online in about 4mins from boot. Puppeee linux is shocking fast, mainly because it is a tiny OS (the whole puppeee distro is 139mb) and stays completely resident in RAM.

The tradeoff is that Puppy's boot and shutdown times are relatively slow. as all the RAM loading and unloading makes it a bit pokey at those times. Boot, for example, takes 58 seconds on my untuned install.

The best comparison I can make is Puppy is to Windows as MySQL is to Oracle. Many folks prefer the free, fast MySQL backend to the $$$, feature-rich, bloated Oracle.

eee!

I do not have a laptop. I avoided buying one for the last few years because I had a work-provisioned one, but I had been glancing at those tiny EEE PCs.


I like the idea of ultraportable "netbooks" because of the solid state storage, the small size, and the rabid developer/user community.

Buy.com is dumping some of the last-gen 16MB Eee 900 refurb units for under $200 shipped so I pulled the trigger on it. Comes w/XP but I plan on putting the tiny/superfast Puppy Linux on it. Since Puppy (or "puppeee", as the Eee variant is called) is entirely RAM-resident I picked up the max 2GB ram for $20.

Will keep you posted.