Eee PC, distro choice, power mgmt

[Jarod Wilson]

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 23:10 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>   So, I was in BestBuy the other day, and saw and bought an Asus Eee
> PC 900A for $200 (1 GB RAM, 4 GB SSD "hard disk", 1600 MHz CPU,
> 100BASE-T, 802.11g, MMC/SD, 3xUSB).  It ships with a Xandros Linux
> configuration which finds new and interesting ways to suck.  So, I
> plan on repartitioning the entire SSD and installing a better distro.
> (This was my intent all along anyway.)  I'm unsure on distro choice
> and wanted to poll for opinions here.
> 
>   What I'd like to find is something lightweight and capable of
> supporting a traditional Unix environment.  I want X11, FVWM, and
> xterm as my main UI.  I want to avoid the collection of
> always-running, memory-hungry daemons which most modern Linux distros
> seem to assume these days.  I might tolerate them on a desktop PC that
> has resources to spare, but this little laptop is somewhat resource
> constrained.  I believe this rules out Fedora and Ubuntu.

Eh, nah. I run Fedora on my Acer Aspire One, Gnome desktop and
everything. Works quite well, actually. I'm typing this email on my AAO,
with Evolution, running on top of Gnome.

The AAO is a 1.6GHz Atom just like that EeePC. It kinda sucked with the
stock 512M of RAM, but after adding another 1G, its happy as can be, and
the 1G in yours should be pretty much just as happy. Only gotcha is
Gnome bits that are designed for larger displays, but I just run w/a
single panel on one side of the screen, tweaked font and widget sizes a
bit, and run most apps full-screen. The only other significant negative
is the miserable write speed of the SSD (which makes package updates
painfully slow).

Oh, and the Atom + gma950 graphics isn't enough to decode high
definition video smoothly (but dvd rips play back great -- I've got a
16G SDHC card I added to mine for some addition storage for such
things).

Ubuntu has a 'netbook remix' edition that I've not actually tried
myself, but I know plenty of people run.

>   I also want the hardware to work.  Fortunately, it seems like there
> are quite a few projects which will give me the needed drivers and
> modules for any number of distros.  So good.  I'm eying "DebianEeePC",
> which is basically Debian "testing" with hardware-specific packages
> pre-loaded.  I'm thinking Debian is a good choice for this because
> Debian has a small base footprint, allows heavy customization, but
> still comes with lots of packages of modern toys.

That would probably work well too.

>   But what about power management?  In particular, I'd like to set up
> this guy with suspend-to-RAM and suspend-to-disk, so that I can have a
> mobile environment that wakes up quickly where I left off last.  I
> have absolutely no clue about how this stuff works with modern Linux.
> Am I setting myself up for trouble by going the minimalist route?

A bit more manual labor perhaps, when you want to suspend, but it
shouldn't be that bad.

> Is
> the suspend stuff all really complicated, and thus warrants bloated
> desktops and a plague of daemons to make it work?

In Fedora-land, I've installed a text-only laptop before (my old
PowerBook G3). With the pm-utils package installed, all I have to do is
type 'pm-suspend' from the cli, and it suspends to RAM just fine.

>   On a related note: For suspend-to-disk, is it required that I have a
> swap partition equal to main RAM?

No clue, I never bother with suspend-to-disk, only suspend-to-RAM.
(Which by the way, works flawlessly on my AAO).

--jarod