Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Revitalizing my EeePC 901

This little machine cost me less than €300 nearly three years ago and it's had a chequered history.
When I got it first, I used it an awful lot and tried out many different OSes in multiboot (despite having only two very small SSDs -- one of 16GB and the other of 4GB).
Then last year I thought it was on the way out as the keyboard started behaving strangely to the point where normal computing was next to impossible,
Now, that problem, which I'm almost certain arose from water ingress to the keyboard, has totally gone and everything works fine once again.
I've just finished repopulating my SSDs with OSes so here I'll report on what I did and any surprises I met.
I removed all of my old OSes apart from Ubuntu 10.10 and now have the following:
1. Haiku r40925 on a 2GB primary partition.
2. Ubuntu 10.10 with a 4.9GB / and a 1.0GB /home
3. ZevenOS 3.0 with a 4.9GB / and a 0.8GB /home
4. Linux Mint 10 Lxce with a 3.4GB / and a 1.8GB /home

I boot everything with Ubuntu's Grub2 and I've had no problems.
Some comments on the performance of the "new" OSes (that is, everything except Ubuntu):

Haiku: Works very well but my wifi card, which was picked up by an earlier Haiku nightly, is not seen now at all. All three of the other OSes on this box (all of which use Ext4) can be easily mounted RW in Haiku which is very useful. The email replicant which has become a mainstay of my Haiku desktop, didn't work so well in the version. I repeatedly get an error stating "Failed to Login: NO [ALERT] Too many simultaneous connections"
The fetching mail indication never goes away until I remove the error notification box. Even then, I get a total of over 300 new mails being shown. Sounds like a bug.

ZevenOS Works well and looks very much like Haiku. However, the boot (about 50s on this machine compared to 15s for Haiku) is slow. It really does give a good idea of how a mature Haiku might look in the future. Worth looking at.

Linux Mint Lxce This really is a nice OS. Looks great and is very finely polished and honed. I'm very tempted to get to know more about this OS although I have been equally impressed with it a few times in the past without sticking with it.

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