Asus eee pc 900a + Linux

I just picked up a refurbished Asus eee pc 900a for $169 shipped. It seems like Asus is flooding the market with these refurbs that feature xandros on a 4gb ssd. My guess is that these are returns where the customer simply couldn't cope with xandros which provides limited functionality and takes up the entire 4gb drive once it is updated. Their loss is my gain.

At any rate, I am going to wipe xandros and install something a bit lighter as soon as it arrives. Hopefully I can turn this into a powerful little machine without having to spend too much money on modifications. Obviously the first thing to do is toss in a sdhc to expand the memory a bit. That 4gb ssd is just not going to to cut it.

Anyone have any experience running linux on these???

 

I have one with a 32gb Super Talent SSD (the 4gb SSD was too slow and small for me)

I run EEEbuntu on it and it runs great!

 

Hrm, I was thinking about just buying an sdhc card but maybe the thing to do is upgrade the ssd. Is it really that slow??

I also noticed that there might be a new version of eeebuntu released this week. Yay!

 

for me, it was painfully slow. I tried a lot of tricks with it to get it to perform (noatime, tmpfs etc) and it was still slow as hell. When I initially installed EEEbuntu, it took over 5 hours just to install the updates due to the slow write speed.

 

okay, as soon as I know it is shipping I will order a new ssd...still a great deal though

thanks for the advice

 

Okay, my gear still hasn't shown up but eeebuntu 3.0 Base (Jaunty) came out on Friday.

http://www.eeebuntu.org/index.php?page=download

 

So I got this little guy up and running with an ssd upgrade and eeebuntu. So far I'm thrilled with this thing...only $220 in all.

 

eeebuntu really runs great on mine too. One of these days I'll have to reload it with the new 9.04 version